Carl Pope

Carl Pope's "The Bad Air Smelled of Roses" presents disparate texts as aesthetically seductive letterpress posters. Through this historic printing process, Pope evokes a larger social history with a visceral connection to the past. The texts range from humorous to confrontational, unconventional to recognizable, exploring psychological and emotional states of forgetfulness, insanity, and alienation associated with the poetics of Blackness.

Carl Pope received an MFA from Indiana University in 1999 and a BA from Southern Illinois University in Cinema and Photography in 1984. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine in 1997. His work was included in Afro-Futurism at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, MN in 2005, The Whitney Biennial in 2000, Enough About Me at Momenta Art in 2002, and Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1994. He received a Louis Tiffany Foundation Award in 2005. His work has been reviewed widely, most recently in The New York Times for his solo exhibition at Momenta.

Yoko Inoue

Yoko Inoue's installation utilizes and reconfigures cheap consumer goods bought at Asian street markets in New York City. By re-creating these objects using a highly aesthetic ceramic process in evocative combinations, she calls attention to the evolution of consumer production and the deep meaning even the most mundane objects can convey. By presenting her work once again in the form of a street market, Inoue not only completes a circuit but heightens the criticality of her transformative project.

Yoko Inoue recently received the Fellowship grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Painters and Sculptors Grant Program Award, and a grant from the Franklin Furnace Archives, Inc, for the Fund for Performance Art. She received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Sculpture 2003. She will be participating in an artists' in residence program at EKWC/European Ceramic Work Center in Holland in 2007. Inoue's work has been shown at Greene Naftali Gallery, Von Lintel Gallery in Manhattan, and The Sculpture Center in Queens, among other venues. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Time Out and other publications.

Karina Aguilera-Skvirsky

Karina Aguilera-Skvirsky's series of photographs titled Backyards reenacts media images of ordinary civilians from the Iraq war in moments of prayer. Removed from their wartime context, the photos become uncanny as the audience works to create new narratives to replace that which has been repressed. The beauty of the work, which references 19th century landscape painting, serves to further exoticize and destabilize our reading.

Karina Aguilera-Skvirsky attended Oberlin College, Ohio, and Indiana University, Indiana. Her work has been exhibited recently at the Impakt Festival in the Netherlands, Jessica Murray Projects, El Múseo del Barrio, and White Columns in New York, She participated in the MacDowell artist in residence program in 2005 and the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2001.

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga: Drawing from public text submissions to an online repository of  personal perspectives on Nicaragua, Zúñiga constructs a revisionist history portraying the ebb and flow of Latin American Marxist revolution. The artist's installation of artist-designed propaganda posters is part of a larger installtion entitled "FALLOUT: What's Left," collapsing the past with the present in an attempt to rattle the U.S.'s media amnesia concerning US foreign interventions of the recent past.

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga received an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. He has been awarded residencies from the Franklin Furnace, the Bronx Museum, the Bauhaus Institute, Harvestworks Media Center. Recent exhibitions include inSite05, San Diego/Tijuana, ARS Electronica, Linz, Austria, <Alt Digital> at the American Museum of the Moving Image, L Factor, at Exit Art, Counter Culture at the New Museum, When Living Was Labor, the Bronx Museum and the Whitney Museum's artport gate page: http://artport.whitney.org/gatepages/december03.shtml