Josh Azzarella
Untitled #125 (Hickory)
Video on VX Series Digital Tiles
ABOUT THE Installation
Through still images, video, and objects, Josh Azzarella explores the power of authorship and collective memory. By isolating, extending, or blurring important moments in popular media, he dislocates the crucial crux of the matter from its familiar location within both its narrative and our cultural understanding of it. Our comfortable recognition of these familiar moments is suspended, offering a new, uncanny way of engaging with the material.
In this piece, Untitled #125 (Hickory), Azzarella takes a clip from The Wizard of Oz (1939). From the appearance of the tornado through the arrival of the Good Witch, this excerpt spans Dorothy's Journey to Oz and the transition from her black and white world into one of color, a seminal moment in cinematic history. Taking that 6 minutes and 30 seconds and stretching it to five days, the duration of Dorothy's experience in Oz, Azzarella distorts our experience of this iconic moment. As of December 2022, Untitled #125 (Hickory) is the 5th-longest experimental film ever produced.
Josh Azzarella (b. Akron, OH) received his MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers, in 2004 and his BFA from the Myers School of Art, University of Akron, in 2002. His work has been written about in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and publications such as Visual Ethics (Routledge, 2018). His work is included in the permanent collections of SFMoMA, MFA Houston, and LACMA, among others. He has collaborated with Teddy Abrams and the Louisville Orchestra and had solo exhibitions at Indiana University and City Gallery Wellington in New Zealand.