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...
Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
Untitled (Grate I/II: Shan Mei Playground/ Grand Fortune Mansion) is part of a series drawn from architectural objects that mark the boundary of public and private spaces Wong encountered while strolling in Hong Kong...
Collectors’ Favorites is an episode of local cable program from the mid-1990s in which ordinary people were invited to present their personal collections—a concept that in many ways anticipates current reality TV shows and internet videos...
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...
Blalock resists the immediacy that we have come to expect from photography—that each photograph should communicate its message without delay...
Tarantism is the name of disease which appeared in southern Italy, resulting from the bite of a spider called Tarantula...
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...
Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...
The White Album (2008) presents a compilation of one hundred issues of Artforum magazine released between 1970 and 1979...
Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon...
Peasant Sensation Passing Through Flesh – 3 consists of a massage chair fixed to a wall...
Physical and mental exploration have been founding elements in Joachim Koester’s research for several years...