Xandra Ibarra (born July 9), who sometimes works under the alias of "La Chica Boom", is a queer, Chicana performance artist based in Oakland, California. Artforum recognized Ibarra's performance Nude Laughing as best in performance in 2016.
Video Xandra Ibarra
Art and Performance
Spictacles
Ibarra performed "spictacles" under the moniker of La Chica Boom from 2002 - 2012. Spictacles, a term coined by Ibarra, "mixed and repurposed traditional Mexican iconography alongside racist tropes within the erotic and sensual vocabulary of burlesque. One example of such a performance is La Tortillera, exhibited in 2004. "The performance consists of Ibarra in "traditional" colorful Mexican tortillera garb. Although she singles out the Mexican housewife, this is also the attire that high end or "authentic" Mexican restaurants require of women who stand in panoptical view of their costumers, assuring the tortilla's faux homemade authenticity. As the performance progresses, Ibarra sheds more and more items of clothing, in the tradition of burlesque, until she dons nothing but her pasties and a Tapatío bottle attached to a strap-on, which she then uses to cum on the tortilla before consuming it."
Nude Laughing
Xandra Ibarra performed Nude Laughing at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles in 2016, where she walks nude while laughing throughout the museum, dragging a nylon sac with paradigmatic "white lady accoutrements" . Through this performance, Ibarra uses nudity and the sonic quality of laughter to explore the "vexed relation racialized subjects have to not only one's own skin, but also one's own entanglements and knots (skeins) with whiteness and white womanhood." The piece is inspired from John Currin's 1998 painting titled "Laughing Nude," which features a nude white woman with her face caught in the middle of maniacal laughter that blurs the erotic with the grotesque. In an email to The Huffington Post, Ibarra explains, "I want to capture what I can of these white nudes in my brown figure and skin and enact a union between sound and gesture that can't be captured within a painting." She aims to bring the nudes to life in what she describes as the "wrong" body, enhancing the grotesque, tactile, and expressive dimensions of how she imagines white womanhood.
Untitled Fucking (A Collaboration)
The 2013 video, Untitled Fucking, is a collaborative performance work by artists Xandra Ibarra and Amber Hawk Swanson that stages a queer intercourse between sex acts and speech acts. Performance studies scholar Juana María Rodriguez examines the video to argue that "feminism also needs to be about imagining a sexual politics that does not require the abandonment of fun and pleasure." She goes on to state that "It is precisely because our sexual realities are so often steeped in abjection and violence that insisting on depictions of sex that represent the viscous substances of our lives becomes so urgent."
Spic Ecdysis
In her photo essay/series Spic Ecdysis (2014) published and featured on the cover of Women and Performance Journal, Ibarra aligns herself with the figure of the cockroach and "dwells within the limits given--showing the false promise of sheer transformation." The term ecdysis means to shed, molt, it comes from Ancient Greek: ????? (ekduo), "to take off, strip off." She captures the symbolic process of shedding the skin of a cockroach by laying next to costumes of former persona La Chica Boom.
Maps Xandra Ibarra
Activism
Ibarra is a community organizer, working within immigrant rights, 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 interpersonal and state violence.
Significance
Venues and Exhibits
Xandra Ibarra's performance work has been featured internationally in a wide range of venues, including, the Eli Broad Museum, the De Young Museum, Anderson Collection, Maccarone Inc Art Gallery, The Stud (bar), Asian Art Museum, El Museo de Arte Contemporañeo (Bogotá, Colombia), Popa Gallery (Buenos Aires, Argentina), Joe's Pub, PPOW Gallery (NYC), and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Grants and Awards
Among her numerous awards are the Art Matters Grant, National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Award, the Fund for the Arts, ReGen Artist Fund and the Franklin Furnace Performance and Variable Media Award.
Features in Academic Publications
Ibarra has attracted the attention of various scholars of performance, gender, and race. Juana María Rodríguez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley writes about Xandra Ibarra's performance and the erotics of the U.S./ Mexican border in her book Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings and in her essay "Viscous Pleasures and Unruly Feminisms" in GLQ. Ivan Ramos, a Professor at the University of Maryland writes about La Chica Boom's performances ' Tortillera and Untitled Fucking. Ramos discusses Ibarra's incorporation of the symbolic Tapatio bottle across many of her performances and discusses how this calls attention to the history of denigration of Mexicans, carried out through the harsh criticisms of the spiciness of Mexican cuisine. Ramos writes about the ways La Chica Boom appropriates and plays with the stereotypes of Mexicans as unsanitary, obnoxiously flavorful, and over sexualized, in order to dismantle them. The author connects Ibarra to the Chicana/o art collective founded in the 1960s, Asco.
Press
Xandra Ibarra has been featured in many newspapers and magazines, most notably, Artforum, Art Practical, Hyperallergic, The Huffington Post, San Francisco Bay Guardian and SF Weekly.
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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