Kota Ezawa: The Crime of Art
”By using images of stolen art, Ezawa implicates himself in the lineage of theft and the dilemma of ownership, especially in the digital world where the availability of images has made information sampling and manipulation so commonplace that the line between real and fake has been blurred.”
—Lita Barrie, Hyperallergic
Co-published with SITE Santa Fe and Mead Art Museum
Texts by Irene Hofmann, Jordan Kantor, Niko Vicario
Hardcover
9 x 10.5 inches
160 pages / 80 images
Trade ISBN: 9781942185321
Signed ISBN: 9798890180124
Limited edition of this book available HERE
The Crime of Art presents photographs and reproductions from KOTA EZAWA’s exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, and Amherst, in which the artist featured his lightbox renderings of paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
The book also draws connections from that project to other works by Ezawa that contemplate crime. Among them are his 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, which includes hand-drawn recreations of historic crime scene photography.
While focusing on a single subject, The Crime of Art brings attention to some of Ezawa’s key projects from the last fifteen years, and coincides with a solo exhibition of his work at SITE Santa Fe in 2017.