Kota Ezawa "Odessa Staircase Redux"    Oct 22 - Dec 24, 2009

San Francisco— Kota Ezawa’s Odessa Staircase Redux, the artist’s third solo exhibition at Haines Gallery, revisits the influential film montage from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin as a series of ink drawings. The drawings are based on the first frame of every cut in the Odessa Staircase sequence, while the photographs reconstruct the same frames with the help of actors. In the exhibition the individual film frame renderings are taken out of their original sequence and are reorganized into groups of related images. In this way, Odessa Staircase Redux meditates on the photographic quality of an ink drawing and on the constructed nature of a photograph. Ezawa will also be showing several staged photographic light boxes.

Ezawa’s work explores the appropriation and mediation of current events and images through computer-generated animations that are reminiscent of old-fashioned cartoons. The subject matter and sources of the images are diverse, ranging from the trial of O.J. Simpson (television); the assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Zapruder film); and the honeymoon of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee (home video). By choosing Battleship Potemkin, a 1925 film reconstruction based on the story of a failed 1905 uprising, Ezawa adds another layer to our perception of the famous film and to his own work as a translator who can reduce complex imagery to the most essential two-dimensional elements.

A book, Odessa Staircase Redux, published by JRP Ringier/ECU Press will accompany the exhibition and will be available at Haines Gallery.

Kota Ezawa was born in Cologne, Germany. He began his undergraduate studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, studying with Nam June Paik and Nan Hoover. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied with Nayland Blake and George Kuchar, and his MFA from Stanford University. In 2010, the artist will receive a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco. Kota Ezawa is Assistant Professor of Media Arts at California College of the Arts.

Ezawa’s work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.