Like many immigrant artists, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky’s work is concerned with belonging. Her practice - which spans performance, photography, film, installation and collage - emerges from an autobiographical journey that meanders into historical terrain. Her deeply researched projects find the artist diving into Inca technologies and philosophies to both make sense of her Ecuadorian heritage and find parallels between Inca life and our modern age. Geometry and architecture are constant references, and photography is always an entry point. More and more, Skvirsky has included self-portraits in her work as a way of revealing her own subjectivity, collaging and cutting up her limbs in a metaphorical process of revealing her many identities to the viewer: Ecuadorian, American, Jewish, mother, artist. 

“I started including myself in the work because I realized I had multiple identities and there wasn’t a way to communicate that,” she says. “The work comes out of this weird space of not fitting in, and its recurringly about family history.”

In Miami, Skvirsky built on How to Build a Wall and Other Ruins, a series that was initiated with a Creative Capital grant and interviews engineers, anthropologists, and historians of the Pre-Columbian world about their theories of how Inkans built Ingapirca, an archeological site in Ecuador that uses the same building techniques the Inkans used to construct Machu Picchu. Skvirsky collages images of the Incan rock formations with images of her body parts against a richly colored background, a nod to the work of artists like Josef Albers. 

Shadow play within these works is a new exploration Skvirsky developed while at Fountainhead. “I kept making maquettes to see if it was going to work out, but I really wanted to see it big,” she says. The resulting works towered on the wall containing all of her parts.