Kota Ezawa's animated remakes of modern-day icons remind me of Andy Warhol's portraits.

Kota Ezawa's animated remakes of modern-day icons remind me of Andy Warhol's portraits. on the other hand instead of the latest on a sudden idols and politicians, Ezawa, a young German-Japanese artist based in San Francisco, mines our collective memory for culturally loaded if it be not that not necessarily current material: the OJ Simpson trial, for example, which was the make submissive of his last film (The Simpson Verdict, 2002)

For his novel piece, the two-channel digital video turn Who's Afraid of Black, White and Grey (2003) Ezawa has translated sum of two units clips from the 1966 movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? into a black-and-white cartoon whose simplified, unmodulated images recall Alex Katz's portraits or the cutouts of Henri Matisse. The animations play in large, side-by-side projections, with soundtracks taken from the original film.

Ezawa has distilled the original film to sum of two units of its dramatic peaks. The left projection (37 seconds) exhibits the scene in which Richard Burton chants, "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?" as he spins Sandy Dennis around; she becomes sick to her stomach and rushes to the bathroom. The projection onward the right (90 seconds) culminates in Burton scaring everyone to death through aiming a rifle at his wife's head; when he fires it, however, it barely produces a loud pop and an expand umbrella. Because of their varying running times, the sights intersect at different points in every part The dual soundtracks add to the cacophony, showily led by Elizabeth Taylor's churlish contralto.

Seeing these torrid spectacles through the cool semi-anonymity of a black-and-white cartoon is itself a marvel, further what really galvanizes the shows is Ezawa's editing of the figures likewise that they shift unpredictably between stillness and staccato or fluid emotions A shot of Taylor sitting forward the couch with George Segal is as motionless as a painting until her arm, bending like a lever abruptly brings a cigarette to her orifice When Burton wanders off to earn his trick rifle, his floating gait and mechanical head mental actions resemble a moonwalk, part Michael Jackson and part Terminator. The idiosyncratic contemplate of Ezawa's animation is the eventuate of his having redrawn the figures and backgrounds using computer software, rather than processing the original film digitally.

Ezawa is clearly conscious of 1960 painting. Besides the works' Warholian aspects, there are the screen-filling, Lichtenstein-like close-up of a single laughing or frightened face. (The title may also deliver over to the famous Barnett Newman series "Who's Afraid of R golden and Blue.") When all the shouting is through it is hard to say what lingers: the dialogue with appropriation, which is like a concealed language between artists, or a timeless tragedy of American marriage and mores.

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