Kota Ezawa, "City of Nature"

Ezawa's video animations, which are essentially rotoscoped frame by frame from existing footage, are marked by a flattened, abstracted style vaguely reminiscent of paint-by-numbers kits. In the past he's accorded this treatment to such archival material as John Lennon and Yoko Ono's famed bed-in press conferences of 1969, and the reading of the O.J. Simpson trial verdict in 1995. For his latest show, which coincides with the Mar 31 opening of his public art project Landscape as Actor in Madison Square Park, Ezawa has strung together scenes from more than 20 feature films—everything from Deliverance to Brokeback Mountain—showing depopulated settings in nature. The exhibit at Murray Guy also includes lightbox pieces and sculptural objects.