Xandra Ibarra: Inventory of Exhaustion
August 5 – September 10, 2016
Opening Reception: Friday, August 5, 7-10pm [RSVP]
Film Screening: Saturday, August 13, 6-8pm [RSPV]
Black & White Projects, 2830 20th Street, Studio 105, San Francisco CA 94110
Open Wed/Thur/Sat 2-6pm, and by appointment
Inventory of Exhaustion is a solo exhibition of new visual works by Oakland-based performance artist Xandra Ibarra (a.k.a La Chica Boom). Featured will be a selection of large-scale photographic works titled Spic Skins, named after Ibarra’s parody-based performances: “spictacles.” The photographs feature vacuum-sealed costumes as artifacts of exhaustion, byproducts, empty spaces, voids, literally vacuumed of matter. The works become sites for locating Ibarra’s body without an image, incorporeal gestures of the self. These costumes as skins are thrown-off, separated, and become vacant forms of herself.
Xandra Ibarra (b.1979) is an Oakland-based performance artist from the US/Mexico border who performs and works under the alias of La Chica Boom. She uses hyperbolized modes of racialization and sexualization to test the boundaries between her own body and coloniality, compulsory whiteness, and Mexicanidad. Her practice integrates performance, sex acts, and burlesque with video, photography, and objects. Throughout her multiple works, she problematizes the borders between proper and improper racial, gender, and queer subject and teeters between spectacular abjection and joy.
Ibarra’s work has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Museo Tamayo (Mexico), The Broad Museum (LA), Popa Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Joe’s Pub (NYC), PPOW Gallery (NYC), and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF) to name a few. She has held residency as an Affiliate Artist at Headland Center for the Arts, Djerrasi, National Performance Network, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and CounterPulse. She has been awarded the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award, NALAC Fund for the Arts, YBCA Away Award, ReGen Grant, and Theater Bay Area Grant. Her work has been profiled by Art Practical, Hyperallergic, GLQ Journal, Women and Performance, The Drama Review, In Dance Magazine, and CURVE magazine.
Ibarra’s community based work is located within immigrant, anti-rape and prison abolitionist movements. Since 2003, she has actively participated in organizing with INCITE!, a national feminist of color organization dedicated to creating interventions at the intersection of state and interpersonal violence. She lectures courses at San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts and presents her academic and performance work at various bars, theaters, universities and museums.
Work for Inventory of Exhaustion is supported in part by the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, the Ford Foundation, and the Surdna Foundation through a grant from the NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant Program.
On View
black and white projects 