Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art
SITElab Project Space

Accompanying Future Shock in SITE's inaugural year will be a series of new SITElab exhibitions to be presented in a new 2,000 square foot gallery space. Continuing the tradition of SITElab, launched in 2013, exhibitions will feature new works sourced directly from artists' studios, experimental projects, interdisciplinary shows, and community-based initiatives.

Launching the new SITElab space will be Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art, a solo exhibition of new and recent works by San Francisco-based artist Kota Ezawa. Exhibition dates are Saturday, October 7, 2017, through Wednesday, January 10, 2018.

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Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art
This exhibition will bring together new and recent works related to Ezawa's The Crime of Art series, a group of light-boxes and video animations that chronicle some of the most infamous and high profile museum heists in history. At the heart of this exhibition is a series of images that pays homage to the 13 artworks (including those by Degas, Manet, Rembrandt, and Vermeer) stolen from the Isabella Stuart Gardener Museum in 1990.

About Kota Ezawa
Kota Ezawa draws from the histories of media, popular culture, and art history to create distilled renderings of iconic images. His simplified versions of indelible images remain easily recognizable and potent, the result of a process that illuminates the hold certain images have on their viewers. Working in a range of mediums such as digital animation, slide projections, light boxes, paper cut-outs, collage, print, and wood sculptures, Ezawa maintains a keen awareness of how images shape our experience and memory of events.

Publication
The exhibition will be accompanied by a new publication, The Crime of Art, which surveys Kota Ezawa's career using crime as a topical lens, published by Radius Books.

The publication draws connections between recent works, including those on view at the SITElab exhibition, and earlier series including animated films The Simpson Verdict (2002) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2005), as well as his ongoing drawing series The History of Photography Remix.