Aldrich Announces 2006 Emerging Artist Award Winner, Josh Azzarella
May 1, 2006The curators of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum are pleased to announce that The Emerging Artist Award for 2006 will go to Josh Azzarella. Azzarella's work will be on view in a solo exhibition from Sunday, October 15, through March 2007 at the Museum.
The Emerging Artist Award is given to an artist whose work exhibits bold innovation, exciting originality, clear direction, and serious dedication. This award is administered and the recipient selected by the curatorial staff of The Aldrich, which includes curatorial director Jessica Hough, director of exhibitions Richard Klein, and director Harry Philbrick. Recipients of the award, which has been presented by the Museum since 1997, receive a cash prize of $5,000 and a solo exhibition at The Aldrich. Previous winners have included Roxy Paine, 1997; Paul Henry Ramirez, 1998; Bonnie Collura, 1999; John F. Simon, Jr., 2000; Claire Corey, 2001; Yuken Teruya, 2002; Elizabeth Demaray, 2003; David Opdyke, 2004; and Todd Hebert, 2005.
Azzarella, who works primarily in digital video and photography, takes on pinnacle events in recent American history in his work. He chooses moments that have been captured on film or video—John F. Kennedy's assassination, and 9/11, for example. Then he alters the documentation of that history, so that while watching his work a viewer can imagine momentarily what life might be like if the event had played out differently.
In Untitled #6 (W.T.P.2), we begin by watching a segment of video footage that is hauntingly familiar. An airplane approaches the World Trade Center on a clear, blue-sky day. We know what will happen…but to our amazement, it doesn't. The plane flies by, and the building is unscathed. Azzarella's video works propose to us, "what if…" A segment of video footage that has come to mark the start of a very difficult time in recent American history is changed—if only what followed could be as easily erased.
The artist's laborious process of carefully taking apart and then re-building the digital files that make up his final pieces brings him into an intimate relationship with the source material-a relationship we might more often associate with an investigator looking into a crime. Azzarella alters the images pixel by pixel, noticing colors, reflections, and details very few other people are likely to have taken note of.
Josh Azzarella lives and works in Highland Park, New Jersey. He is an adjunct professor of art at Rutgers University and Raritan Valley College.
