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Art
Josh Azzarella

When

Oct 17, 2008 – Nov 29, 2008

Tuesdays–Fridays (10am–6pm)

Saturdays (11am–5pm)

Where
Kavi Gupta Gallery (835 W Washington Blvd, 312.432.0708)
Price
FREE
Details
http://www.kavigupta.com/exhibit/exhibitions.php
Exhibit_large

Josh Azzarella's photographs and videos smolder with an eerie silence and a sense of emptiness. They are also faintly, unnervingly familiar. Most are manipulations of famous images culled from the news media — photographic icons that stand in for certain public tragedies or war-time crises. In each case, Azzarella digitally removes the main objects of focus as if they were repressed traumas in our collective psyche. An image of the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach is reduced to an unidentifiable, barren coastline. Other pictures are immediately recognizable but chillingly defused; in views of a napalm strike in Vietnam, for instance, or of a lone protester in Tiananmen Square, people appear to linger around a haunting absence.

Karsten Lund