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. Similarly, in Skvirsky’s video Blowback, actual media images of wartime victims are isolated then recontextualized into Central Park, effectively bringing the war home. Moving slowly toward the camera and looming ever larger against a soundtrack mixed from horror movies, the figures reference zombies caught in a crossfire of news cameras. In both Blowback and Backyards, Skvirsky’s technique owes much to the science fiction genre, with the act of bodysnatching making manifest a xenophobia that underlies much U.S. news reporting and popular culture.

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.