For his work Boardwalk, Kota Ezawa rebuilds in YBCA’s Sculpture Court a side view of the Seaside Heights boardwalk on the New Jersey shore, which was devastated during Hurricane Sandy. In the aftermath of the storm’s destruction, the image of the recreated amusement park evokes a sense of melancholy for a form of entertainment endangered by rising seawaters and unpredictable weather patterns. Restoring the boardwalk by proxy, the project, in the artist’s words, acts as a type of “visual disaster relief.”

Boardwalks themselves hold a special place in the American imagination. In Boardwalk, this bold architectural structure is transformed: the amusement park becomes a sculpture, and a museum sculpture court becomes an amusement park. The gesture reveals the shared visual and experiential correspondences between these two environments. Ezawa has frequently addressed the idea of the “remake” in past animations and drawings that reproduce existing videos, films, or photographs; Boardwalk extends this thread in his practice to the area of sculpture, architecture and
 public life.