In the quiet gallery, your heart beats faster. Breathing quickens. Blood hums in your ears. On a video screen a plane—too low, too close—flies over a city skyline. The camera follows shakily as the plane dips its left wing and begins to turn as the Twin Towers come into view. Your stomach churns. You have seen this video before, and the ending is sickeningly familiar. But wait—by what seems to be a hair’s width, the plane passes in front of the Towers and continues its flight above New York City.

Relief washes over you, a feeling of dreamlike giddiness that we have been wrong all these years: September 11 was just like any other day.

For Josh Azzarella’s first solo exhibition in the Mid-Atlantic region, Second Street presents a selection of his mesmerizing video pieces and still photographs, which viewers describe as simultaneously painful and healing, lurid and tranquil, lifelike and incredible. His work provokes a visceral reaction as powerful as any in contemporary art. In a painstaking process of frame-by-frame digital alteration using images and footage culled from the Associated Press and amateur files, Azzarella turns familiar, deeply engrained images of wars, assassinations, and catastrophes into innocuous non-events, played in endless loops that recall the repetitive presentation of the historic events on television and the internet. What Azzarella has done is far more complex than simply rewriting history, for his audience inevitably fills in the blanks, replacing tormented prisoners in his image of a vacant Abu Ghraib hallway, or inserting tanks in an empty Tiananmen Square. He does not shield the viewer from the truth, but instead revives and reinforces it.

Also included in the show are two of Azzarella’s most recent videos, in which clips are layered and relayered, the opacity altered, and the video slowed to create an abstract, ever-shifting image. Pieces of the original source are recognizable for a moment, only to melt away the next second. The most haunting of these features melded images of several individuals who fell from the Twin Towers on September 11. The figure resembles a bird in flight, then a child in the fetal position, then an elegant diver, as if in Azzarella’s films lies the power to be reborn or reincarnated.

Josh Azzarella lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from the Myers School of Art at the University of Akron and an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers. He has exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and internationally, and is a recipient of the 2006 Emerging Artist Award from the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and the 2003 Fassbender Award for Excellence in Photography. He is represented by DCKT Contemporary in New York.