Oct 17, 2008 – Nov 29, 2008
Tuesdays–Fridays (10am–6pm)
Saturdays (11am–5pm)
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