Lafayette’s Professor Karina Skvirsky was among four selected artists (Melanie Baker, A.J. Bocchino, Marc Lepson, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky) at The Aperture Foundation’s “What Matters Now? Proposals for a New Front Page” interactive and emerging exhibit this past September. The artists were chosen because they each engaged the notion of the front page, its content or form in some way. Their works, “created between 2001 and 2007, not surprisingly addressed such events as 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The projects reinterpret the front page at a moment when our information age is passing into our days dominated by short and frequent bursts of information delivered by social media. Still, the artist’s hand emphasizes the importance of the local in reporting and receiving information as well as the transparency or bias of editorial directions, which has a history and a context” (Erin Donnelly). The show, curated by Fred Ritchin, was a huge success. You can read more about it here: http://aperture.org/whatmattersnow/about-what-matters-now/
Professor Skvirsky hung works from the A Nation Challenged series . Caves, Fear, First Phase, Snow, 2003. The series was made by scanning images and articles from the Nation Challenged Section of the New York Times that came out after Sept. 11, 2001. In this series Karina explores how the war is pictured and presented by the media as well as visual strategies inherent to digital technology (montage and the appropriation of images from the web). She digitally added Roadrunner icons and used its color palette to render the original war photographs, shifting their interpretation towards a familiar representation of the American landscape rather than a foreign one. She also removed text from the original articles to provide a new context for the images, replacing it with text that references the landscape and not the war. This emphasis on the landscape provides an alternative to viewing Afghanistan as enemy territory and suggests similarities with the Roadrunner Landscape. The titles of each image refer to the dates when the original photographs and articles were printed and each print is approximately 17 x 22 in. “Karina Aguilera Skvirsky’s manipulated images make those of the “newspaper of record” at once less sentimental, less alien and also more clearly fictive” (Erin Donnelly).
Deborah Willis also invited Professor Skvirsky to her round table session on Friday, September 16th at the Aperture Foundation with NYU students, Erin Donnelly, Lori Novak, and Fred Ritchin.
Check out this video of Professor Skvirsky talking about the work she hung and the facebook album of the exhibition below! http://aperture.org/whatmattersnow/2011/contributing-artist-karina-aguilera-skvirsky/
