Human Resources Los Angeles presents Nothing lower than I, a solo exhibition by interdisciplinary artist Xandra Ibarra. The exhibition is anchored in an archival exploration and artistic study of Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose’s canonical performances experimenting with sadism, masochism, pleasure, illness and disability in 1980s and 90s Los Angeles. Playing with sub mythologies and objects, Ibarra considers the relationship between care and pain, art and labor, sculpture and flesh. Her sculptures—steel pasties, bruised leather hammers, and wheelchairs—contend with the interplay of consent, race, and disability. Engaging historical and ongoing attachments, she invokes archival ghosts to think through ideas of bottomhood and dehumanization.
The exhibition is curated by Jeanne Vaccaro in a collaboration between HRLA and the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries.
Xandra Ibarra, who sometimes works under the alias of La Chica Boom, is an Oakland-based performance artist and community organizer from the U.S./Mexico border region of El Paso/Juárez. Ibarra works across performance, video, and sculpture to address abjection and joy and the borders between proper and improper racial, gender, and queer subjectivities. Her art has been featured at El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Bogotá), The Broad (Los Angeles), ExTeresa Arte Actual (Mexico City), the Leslie-Lohman Museum (New York City), and the Anderson Collection (Stanford). Ibarra’s work is located within feminist, immigrant, anti-rape, and prison abolitionist movements.
Gallery hours
Wed-Sun, 12-6pm
from March 5-March 20
Exhibition Programs
Friday, March 4, 7-9pm: Exhibition Opening
Wednesday, March 9, 4pm: Artist talk on zoom: (link:https://usc.zoom.us/j/91456059829)
Saturday, March 12, 7pm: Bottom Poetry presented by Deluge Books (readers announced soon!)
Sunday, March 13, 2pm: Ron Athey walk through
Sunday, March 20, 2pm: Sheree Rose walk through
