September 6 - October 18, 2008 Opening reception September 6 from 6 to 8 pm
Multiplex will feature two new animations by Kota Ezawa that draw from, respectively, the 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, and a YouTube video showing an infamous 2004 brawl at an NBA basketball game. In both works, Ezawa replaces the camera�s mimetic gaze with a digitally animated screen that selectively filters information and details from the original source material. While pointedly different in tone, subject matter and narrative structure, both animations�and particularly the dialogic space created between them�ask us to consider our relationship to filmed images as they are continually framed, re-framed and circulated.
LYAM 3D is a silent vector-based animation of scenes from the seminal Resnais/Robbe-Grillet film, L'ann�e derni�re � Marienbad, projected in 16mm. Viewed through anaglyph red-green glasses, Ezawa�s 3D animation circles around the film�which itself is almost hermetically circuitous�by focusing on shots in which the actors remain nearly motionless, fixed to their baroque surroundings like models in a diorama. Yet as the animations move across the screen, the characters appear to shift endlessly in space. Ezawa disturbs our assumed proximity to the images, simultaneously flattening and deepening the film, distending and slowly warping its oblique topology.
Also set in a palace�the Palace of Auburn Hills, home of the Detroit Pistons�Brawl is a 16mm animated film of a fight at a Pistons-Pacers game that began with a foul and a cup of beer thrown from the stands and ended with the suspension of 9 NBA players. Accustomed to tracking the linear movement of the ball through the court, the televised video feed jerkily shifts and pans and zooms throughout the arena to show multiple points of conflict simultaneously unfolding. Ezawa describes the scene as reminiscent of a Rubens painting, for instance The Battle of the Amazons, 1598, where tension is dispersed across the surface. The soundtrack contains no commentary, just the voices of players and audience coming from the stadium floor and catacombs.
This will be Kota Ezawa�s second solo exhibition at Murray Guy. Born in 1969 in Cologne, Germany, he studied at the D�sseldorf Kunstakademie, San Francisco Art Institute and Stanford University, and lives and works in San Francisco. His work is currently on view as part of The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum; Hayward Gallery, London; ArtPace, San Antonio; Santa Monica Museum of Art; Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford; and Charles H. Scott Gallery, Vancouver.
GALLERY NEWS
Matthew Buckingham will take part in the Third Guangzhou Triennial, opening on September 6. His work will also be on view this fall as part of the exhibition Reality Check at the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, in The Cinematic, or Moving Images Expanded: Artists' Film and Video Showcase 2008 at INSA Art Space, Seoul, South Korea, in The Green Room: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art at the CCS Hessel Museum at Bard College, in the exhibition Nonknowledge at Project Arts Centre, Temple Bar, Dublin, and in Framing and Being Framed: The Uses of Documentary Photography at the Wesleyan University Art Gallery.
Francis Cape will take part in Prospect 1. New Orleans, the first international biennial of New Orleans, organized by Dan Cameron and opening on November 1.
Alejandro Cesarco will be featured in the exhibition The Archeology of Longings at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, opening on September 17.
Kota Ezawa's work is on view through October 19 in Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium Since 1960 at the Metropolitan Museum or Art, New York. He will present new work in the exhibition Ours: Democracy and the Age of Branding, opening on October 15 at the Vera List Center for the Arts, New York, and will also be featured in the exhibitions Framed and Being Framed: The Uses of Documentary Photography at the Wesleyan University Art Gallery, and Floating Architectures and Constant Centers: Some Projections, at the Martin Art Gallery, Pennsylvania.
Patricia Esquivias will take part in the inaugural exhibition at the New York Center for Art and Media Studies, opening on September 19.
An-My L�'s travelling exhibition 29 Palms + Small Wars will be on view at the Johnson Museum at Cornell University from September 6 to October 26. She will have a large group of photographs in the exhibition On the Subject of War opening on October 16 at the Barbican Gallery, London, as well as works in The Green Room: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art at the CCS Hessel Museum at Bard College, in Of People and Places at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Art Gallery, and in Framing and Being Framed: The Uses of Documentary Photography at the Wesleyan University Art Gallery.
Ann Lislegaard will present a major outdoor installation as part of The Light Project, opening on September 4 at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis. Her work is currently on view at the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia in the exhibition Modern Ruin. She will also have works on view this fall as part of The Cinematic, or Moving Images Expanded: Artists' Film and Video Showcase 2008 at INSA Art Space, Seoul and in the exhibition In The Space of Elsewhere at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, London.
Barbara Probst will have a major solo exhibition opening on October 5 at the Domaine de Kergu�hennec - Centre d'Art Contemporain, Bignan, France. She will also have works on view as part of the exhibition Role Models at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC.
