Professor Karina Skvirsky, the head of the art department, traveled to Argentina last weekend to showcase her artwork at Arteba, one of the most important art fairs in Latin America.
This collection of Skvirsky’s work focuses on an Ecuador archaeological site called Imgapirca, where Skvirsky’s mother is from. In her research, Skvirsky explored the technologies used by the Incans and the Cañari, two indigenous groups, to create their buildings. She found that Incans carved rocks and formed their buildings without the use of mortar, while the Cañari took uncut river rocks and used mortar.
Skvirsky’s understanding of these technologies influenced the art she created. Using photographs of the Incan and Cañari rocks, images of her own body and dyed alpaca weavings, Skvirsky collaged the materials into multiple works.
“On my website, if you go to ‘Sacred Geometry’ … you can see these pieces with rocks on my body,” Skvirsky said. “That’s where I kind of started with putting rocks on my body, but, of course, it’s a collage … it’s connected to my own identity, but also we think about these histories and getting inside these histories, so I’m like literally getting inside the histories.”
Through her work, Skvirsky grapples with an eagerness to label indigenous groups in the postcolonial era as either good or bad.
“There isn’t a purity in terms of identity, and there isn’t a purity necessarily in terms of the politics even though there are definitely villains in the story, right?” Skvirsky said. “I guess I’m thinking about the Cañari and the Incans, like the perspective from outside is that the Incans, they’re indigenous so they’re good, but they’re not fully good.”
Additionally, she wanted to shine light on how different cultures contribute to each other’s advancements.
“I want [the] audience to think about Inca technology as being just as smart as any Western technology, but I also want [the] audience to think about history in a nonlinear way … just because the Incans took over the Cañari doesn’t mean that the Cañari lost their identity,” she said.
Thanks to her experiences in Buenos Aires, Skvirsky was invited to show her work at Virgil Gonzales’ Gallery in Argentina next year. This provides Skvirsky the opportunity to spend the next year preparing for her upcoming exhibit.
Skvirsky also has the opportunity to share her experiences as a professional artist with her students through lessons on marketing, giving them contacts for internships and even providing the chance to work with her on her own art.
Juliana Soldat ’24, who helped Skvirsky on her exhibit last spring, feels that working with Skvirsky was an enriching experience.
“Karina and I had a really easy dynamic of working together where she would explain her vision and how she wanted me to cut out her photography to get that vision across,” Soldat wrote in an email.
“I learned a lot about the ‘behind the scenes’ work to have art shows that exhibit the same pieces,” Soldat wrote. “The work has to be designed and cut in such a way that the first installation of these items is nearly identical to every following installation. That was probably the hardest part of the work – making sure it fit her current and past visions.”
