Streaming Media

Untitled Film Still

Authors

RISD Museum
A. Will Brown, Rhode Island School of DesignFollow

Files

Description

When making his prints, animations, and light boxes, Ezawa looks for source images on the Internet, manipulates them, and distills them to their essentials. Untitled Film Still belongs to a series of works for which Ezawa appropriated several famous photographs in order to deal with the questions of why some images become icons and how one looks at and interprets imagery. It is a playful appropriation of Cindy Sherman’s photograph with the same title from 1978. Sherman’s seminal Untitled Film Still series was in fact single photographs in which a female character (always played by Sherman herself) is trapped in the image without any explanation of the scenery or narrative action. Sherman’s characters represent post-World War II mass-media feminine stereotypes, which are, despite their falseness, still largely present in the collective consciousness. Ezawa’s version underscores the artificial nature of the image and allows it to be read in new ways. 2005

Publication Date

11-25-2014

Publisher

RISD Museum

City

Providence, Rhode Island

Keywords

Rhode Island School of Design Museum; appropriation; post-World War II; mass-media; stereotypes; artificiality; Cindy Sherman; iconography

Disciplines

Sculpture

Recommended Citation

RISD Museum and Brown, A. Will, "Untitled Film Still" (2014). Channel. 37.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/risdmuseum_channel/37