Ammo Bunker

2009 - Installation (Installation)

Mario Ybarra Jr.

location: Los Angeles, California
year born: 1973
gender: male
nationality: American
home town: Los Angeles, California

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.


Colors:



Related works from the » 2000's created around » Los Angeles, California

Undocumented Intervention
© » KADIST

Julio Cesar Morales

2006

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...

Untitled
© » KADIST

Jedediah Caesar

2009

For Untitled, Caesar encased recycled objects such as scraps of plywood, paper or cloth in resin and then cut and reassembled the pieces into abstract forms...

Mushroom Cloud
© » KADIST

Raymond Pettibon

2000

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...

Untitled (Four-legged figure with three arms)
© » KADIST

Clare Rojas

2006

Rojas’s two pieces in the Kadist Collection— Untitled (four-legged…) and Untitled (Bird’s Eyes) —are representative of her pictorial style which uses bold colorful blocks of paint and female and animal characters...

Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper
© » KADIST

Miljohn Ruperto

2009

Miljohn Ruperto’s silent video work Appearance of Isabel Rosario Cooper is an archive of ghosts...

Untitled (Wheelchair drawing)
© » KADIST

Edgar Arceneaux

2006

Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...

The End One
© » KADIST

Raymond Pettibon

2005

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...

Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants
© » KADIST

Paul McCarthy

2008

Memory Mistake of the Eldridge Cleaver Pants was created for the show Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life Part 1 , held at California College of the Arts’s Wattis Institute in 2008 and curated by McCarthy himself...

Untitled (from the Hill of Poisonous Tree Series)
© » KADIST

Dinh Q. Lê

2008

Hill of Poisonous Trees (three men) (2008) exemplifies the artist’s signature photo-weaving technique, in which he collects diverse found photographs—portraits of anonymous people, stills from blockbuster films, or journalistic images—cuts them into strips, and weaves them into new composition...

Untitled (Wall Street's Chosen Few…)
© » KADIST

Raymond Pettibon

2000

Untitled (Wall Street’s Chosen Few…) is typical of Pettibon’s drawings in which fragments of text and image are united, but yet gaps remain in their signification...

Untitled 3737 and Untitled 5157
© » KADIST

Todd Hido

2005

The two pieces in the Kadist Collection depict foggy landscapes, one at dawn, the other at nighttime...

The Simpson Verdict
© » KADIST

Kota Ezawa

2002

The Simpson Verdict is a three-minute animation by Kota Ezawa that portrays the reading of the verdict during the OJ Simpson trial, known as the “most publicized” criminal trial in history...

Apartment on Cardboard
© » KADIST

Chris Johanson

2000

Apartment on Cardboard (2000) is an exterior view of an abstracted apartment building...

EASTER MORNING
© » KADIST

Bruce Conner

2008

Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...

Untitled (Superman)
© » KADIST

Raymond Pettibon

2005

The five works included in the Kadist Collection are representative of Pettibon’s complex drawings which are much more narrative than comics or cartoon...

Walking Through
© » KADIST

Koki Tanaka

2009

Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...

Untitled (Schindler House, #01)
© » KADIST

Luisa Lambri

2007

Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...

I am Human, Abstract Foil, No Humans IV
© » KADIST

Chris Johanson

2004

Chris Johanson’s paintings, sculptures, and installations break down everyday scenes and commonplace dramas into colorful forms; the darkest sides of humanity are invoked with humor...