About the Work

Azzarella’s research-based practice examines how images shape personal and collective memory, and how meaning is constructed through systems of representation. Working across photography, moving image, sound, installation, and computational processes, the projects investigate the structures through which images acquire authority and become embedded within cultural understanding.

The works begin with existing photographs, films, recordings, datasets, or other forms of mediated evidence. Through strategies of intervention, translation, duration, substitution, and reconstruction, these materials are altered in ways that reveal their underlying assumptions and relationships. Rather than producing alternate histories or speculative narratives, the projects explore how meaning persists, migrates, or dissolves when the conditions through which an image is understood are transformed.

Underlying this practice is an interest in the instability of memory and the relationship between experience and representation. As images circulate through culture, they often come to replace, complicate, or reorganize the events they appear to document. The resulting works occupy this space of uncertainty, examining how images shape what is remembered, forgotten, and believed.

The work has been exhibited at institutions including The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, City Gallery Wellington, UNLV Barrick Museum, Akademie der Künste, Vancouver Art Gallery, Akron Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, 21c Museum, Griffin Museum of Photography, and the California Museum of Photography. It is held in public and private collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Akron Art Museum, JP Morgan Chase Collection, and The Margulies Collection.

As with Azzarella's previous works -- all of which involve removing either the people or other main elements from universally recognizable images -- the act of removing creates not an emptiness, but a void that is filled in a rush of possible alternatives. And in the end, that makes the artist's true subject not the works upon which he operates, not art history, and not politics -- but rather, his work is about the very nature of memory, attention, and experience themselves. And it does exactly the one thing everyone can agree that art should do and that the best art has always done -- it shows us back our world in a way that forever changes how we see it.

— Shana Nys Dambrot, WhiteHot Magazine.

Untitled #310 highlights how AI’s reliance on algorithmic recognition introduces the potential for misinterpretation. What kind of evidence will the photograph become when initiated by the non-human trigger of algorithmic determination? What does that picture represent, relative to the phenomenon that caused it and the violence it cannot record?

— Sarah M. Miller, Capture 2026