Image credit: Xandra Ibarra, Chest Rest, 2020.

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.

Exhibition Programs

Exhibition Opening: Friday, March 4, 7-9pm

Walk-through & Conversation: Saturday, March 5, 11am (thinking Nothing Lower Than I with José Muñoz’s work)

Walk-through & Conversation: Wednesday, March 9, 12-1pm

Jennifer Doyle, author of Sex Objects: Art & the Dialectics of Desire and Hold It Against Me invites you to join her in a conversation with Xandra Ibarra’s sex objects & the feelings they generate in & for us.

Artist talk on zoom: Wednesday, March 9, 4pm (click on this link)

Xandra Ibarra in conversation with curator Jeanne Vaccaro; Introduction by Ana Briz. Presented by the USC Center for Latinx Studies, American and Ethnic Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies

Bottom Poetry presented by Deluge Books: Saturday, March 12, 7pm with Brontez Purnell, Trisha Low, Aimee Goguen, K Allado-McDowell, Yatta Zoker, Janetta Rich, and Phoebe Kaufman.

Ron Athey walk through: Sunday, March 13, 2pm

Sheree Rose walk through: Sunday, March 20, 2pm

Vaccination card is required for entry and attendants are required to wear a mask at all times inside the gallery.

Image credit: Xandra Ibarra, Free To Those Who Deserve It, 2020.