Karina Aguilera Skvirsky’s series of photographs titled Backyards reenacts media images of ordinary civilians from the Iraq war in moments of prayer. 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, media images of war victims are isolated, then recontextualized into Central Park, bringing the war home.

Skvirsky attended Oberlin College and Indiana University. Her work has been exhibited 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.