Ammo Bunker (2009) is a multipart installation that includes large-scale wall prints and an architectural model. The work takes as its departure point the history of Wilmington, Ybarra’s native hometown in southern Los Angeles. The piece refers to a Civil War era ammunition store that Ybarra found at the heart of the harbor close to Long Beach. The facility was later used as a temporary prison to hold different people coming from Mexico to Los Angeles during the Civil War. The building’s walls are covered with different marks and inscriptions from that time—what Ybarra likes to call L. A.’s earliest graffiti and which today coexist with recent gang tags. By pointing out the presence of these two kinds of inscriptions in the same historical place, Ybarra furthers his investigation into the intertwining of Mexican-American and Anglo-American social and cultural histories in Southern California.
Mario Ybarra Jr. belongs to a generation of Mexican-American artists who embrace their double heritage and use it in order to create critical and compelling artistic work. Ybarra is based in Los Angeles, where he grew up, and a large part of his artistic practice has grown out of issues related to his upbringing in the Chicano community of Wilmington. He consistently explores the culture and politics of the West Coast to produce, as he says, contemporary art that is filtered through a Mexican-American experience. Ybarra is not only a multifaceted artist, but also works as an educator, gallerist, activist, and social anthropologist.
From the series the Old and the New (XI) by Carlos Garaicoa belongs to the series Lo viejo y lo nuevo / Das Alte und das Neue (The Old and the New) which was first exhibited in 2010 at Barbara Gross Gallery in Germany...
Julio Cesar Morales’s watercolor drawings, Undocumented Intervention , show a variety of surprising hiding places assumed by people trying to cross into the United States without documentation...
The video Interrupted Passage presents a performance Morales staged in the former home of Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, a mid-nineteenth-century Mexican general serving in California...
Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
Untitled (Perfect Lovers + 1) by Cerith Wyn Evans takes as its starting point Felix Gonzales-Torres’s seminal work Untitled (Perfect Lovers) , in which two clocks were synchronized and left to run without interference, the implication being that one would stop before the other...
Compositions such as Tree on Keystone (2011) become hyperreal versions of their real-world equivalents...
Blalock resists the immediacy that we have come to expect from photography—that each photograph should communicate its message without delay...
Contrabando is a work that references the larger sociological phenomenon in which immigrant economic strategies come to infiltrate urban landscapes...
Starting with Bruce Nauman’s iconic artwork, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) , Mungo Thomson’s neon sign is one of a series that replaces Nauman’s quixotic mini-manifesto with aphorisms from ‘recovery’ culture, especially those made popular by alcoholics anonymous...
To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...
Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...