Art Review - March Issue - (Page 31)
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ART, MUSIC, ARCHITECTURE, FILM, SHOPPING, NEWS AND MOTION PICTURES: EZRA
JOHNSON Painter Ezra Johnson’s first solo museum exhibition, What
Visions Burn, is a 22and-a-half-minute DVD; but in a way it contains
scores of paintings. His lowtech approach to digital animation involves
painting, photographing and then repainting single canvases for each scene
in such a way that he is, in effect, creating celluloid palimpsests.
Johnson’s painting style evokes Impressionists like Degas and
Toulouse-Lautrec who were attracted to the fuzzy chaos of crowd scenes and
the fleshy, saturated colours of cafés, theatres and bohemian nightlife,
demonstrating a love of rough-hewn textures and emotionally charged
locations that isn’t far off from cinematography. The story a daring art
heist in New York calls for the recreation of art historical and
contemporary masterpieces in its sets, for complex establishing shots and
evocative exteriors such as the moon peeking through clouds over the New
York skyline that would be ascribed a cinematic sensibility even if one
were seeing only the paintings on the walls. The press materials call the
project a ‘painting-film’, which is an unconventional hyphenate to
begin with, saying notably: ‘This is film both of and about painting,
and it is painting both of and about film.’ By using a layered narrative
that occasions, for example, seeing the theft of paintings through the
visual perspective of a security camera in effect looking at paintings
within paintings and film within film at the same time , his relentlessly
self-referential and transparent honesty to his process points to the
deeper metaphor still, wherein the art thieves exist as metaphors for
modern digital culture’s enchantment with reckless acquisition and
appropriation, and wherein painting still holds all the power. Shana Nys
Dambrot EZRA JOHNSON, WHAT VISIONS BURN, TO 6 MAY, HAMMER MUSEUM, LOS
ANGELES WWW.HAMMER.UCLA.EDU What Visions Burn, 2006, DVD, 22 min 27 sec.
Courtesy Kantor/ Feuer Gallery, Los Angeles ARTREVIEW p 31-40 Dispatches
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http://WWW.HAMMER.UCLA.EDU
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue
Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record
Art Review - March Issue
https://www.nxtbookmedia.com