Zuniga & Skvirsky

Drawing from public text submissions to an online repository of personal perspectives on Nicaragua, Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga constructs a revisionist history portraying the ebb and flow of Latin American Marxist revolution. At a time when the U.S. Government considers possible flaws in its current interventionist strategies and as South American socialist leaders challenge U.S. policy, the installation "FALLOUT: What's Left" collapses the past with the present in an attempt to rattle the U.S.'s media amnesia. The installation will feature propaganda posters commissioned for the installation from four designers: Isabel Chang, Enrique Sacasa, Ed Adams, and David Ulrich; a new video game by the artist "Always Go Left;" a mini FM public radio station, and free Scype sessions during the holiday season for migrants separated from family. For a prelude to the installation please visit: http://turbulence.org/Works/fallout/.

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, 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

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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.

Pressetext

Ricardo Miranda Zuniga & Karina Aguilera Skvirsky