The cover image for this issue of Artkrush is a detail of a video still from Two Stolen Honeymoons Are Better Than One, a 2007 two-channel animation by Kota Ezawa. Using Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's infamous home video of their honeymoon, Ezawa re-drew each frame of the footage on his computer. As a result, a celebrity sex tape becomes two painterly animations, projected side-by-side in both bright and dusky palettes.

Born in 1969 in Cologne, Germany, Ezawa studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Nam June Paik and Nan Hoover. In 1994, he received a scholarship to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he received his BFA, and in 2003, he completed his MFA at Stanford University. He has had solo exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, the Hayward Gallery in London, the Haines Gallery in San Francisco, Murray Guy in New York, and the Gandy Gallery in Bratislava, Slovakia. In 2006, the San Francisco Museum of Art honored Ezawa with a SECA Award, a biennial prize given to local artists and accompanied by an exhibition.

Ezawa's works recast moments from history and pop culture, reducing familiar subjects into flat, graphic icons. For The Simpson Verdict (2002), he appropriates the shifty recordings of the single camera present at the O.J. Simpson trial, stylizing the proceedings into candy-colored vectors and caricaturing the moment when Judge Ito declares, "Not guilty." In The Unbearable Lightness of Being (2005), he re-imagines the assassinations of JFK and Abraham Lincoln. In The History of Photography Remix series, Ezawa applies his signature treatment to landmark photographs, including the sight of the Earth from the moon, a Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still, and an August Sander portrait of bohemian painters. Ezawa strips images to their very essence, questioning the media's power over subjects and viewers alike. - Lauren McKee