Kota Ezawa, Resident Artist Lecture 2022

Kota Ezawa gives a lecture at Skowhegan talking about his interdisciplinary practice which spans drawing, painting, animation, sculpture, video, and music. Ezawa begins his lecture by talking about the importance for him to approach video as a sculptural medium and how working with photographs and translating them to digital drawings has allowed him to work with obsolete and new technology. This translation that can happen helps Ezawa to heighten the emotional content of a photograph that is now presented as a digital drawing. Ezawa talks about his process of studying historical images which he observes is something that people have been doing forever through borrowing and remixing. Ezawa particularly mentions the Pictures generation, and how they were able to create a natural evolution of image making through remixing, sampling, appropriating, and borrowing. Ezawa says that by picking images he finds important, he gives himself the freedom to allow these images to become a part of a permanent record and to document things very effectively. Ezawa states how painting and drawing can be a super effective way to document things, and how they possess a power that drives people to want to build collections out of them. For Ezawa, his digital drawings have also led to him creating animations, and the ways in which he chooses his subject matter very intuitively in order to learn alongside the viewer. Ezawa’s animations allow him to think about flatness which he is interested in exploring as a surface. Ezawa continues his lecture, explaining how his work is driven by the need to understand the ways in which journalism and non-fiction can be used to recreate moments from history. Ezawa discusses his relationship to sound and image, and how for him, the two work best when they have an interesting relationship which can lead to moments of tension and conflict. Ezawa ends his lecture by commenting on differences between blue collar artists and white collar artists, the inherent ways in which art by itself is political, his commitment to practicing as an artist in the United States because of the art and music that has flourished here, and how making art is no longer just about himself but about the the interaction and dialogue with the viewer.