Odessa Staircase Redux

Edited by Kathy Slade.

Co-published by ECU Press, Charles H. Scott Gallery, and JRP|Ringier.

Odessa Staircase Redux is a retroactive storyboard for Sergei Eisenstein’s montage sequence from The Battleship Potemkin. The first frame of every cut in the scene is re-drawn in black ink. The ensuing series of 158 drawings form a flipbook version of the film scene that highlights the vast number of cuts and the juxtapositions between neighboring shots. An accompanying booklet of archival films stills depicting a protest by UC Berkeley students against a House Un-American Committee meeting at San Francisco City Hall in 1961.

Kota Ezawa depicts iconic moments from art history, film, photography, and popular culture and re-presents them as animated videos, slide projections, light boxes, and prints. The work’s paired down minimalist aesthetic helps to streamline Ezawa’s focus on the changing role of the camera and its effect on the viewers reception.

Kota Ezawa is a German Japanese artist born in Cologne and currently based in San Francisco. He has had solo exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, St Louis Art Museum, The Hayward Gallery in London, and the Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver. His work is included in numerous public collections including Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. Ezawa is represented by Murray Guy in New York, Haines Gallery in San Francisco, Gandy Gallery in Bratislava, and Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt.