Conde, Daniela - Week 6

 Xandra Ibarra, also known as La Chica Boom, is a Xicana performance and visual artist. She works with multiple mediums and is unapologetic in her work. Her background as a community organizer is also visible in her work, in the ways that she critiques power but also focuses on the joy and pleasure of racialized communities. While looking through her website, it is clear that she engages and challenges us, the viewer/public, with unsettling normalized ideas and ideologies of gender, borders, sexuality, identity and politics. In her work “Se Corre,” which is made with vinyl, horse hair, pigment and steel created in 2019 is an example of a work that blends in her humor, critique, and conceptual work. “Se Corre” is part of “This Is The End” Pastie series, which includes works created in 2016, 2019 and 2020. All of the enlarged pasties painted different colors, with horse hair hanging from them as the tassels. “Se Corre” is painted in dark blue color, and they are hung on a painted wall that is white and deep peach color. Facing the work directly from the front one is not entirely certain what they are but from different angles you begin to see that they are pasties at a scale that one has not seen before. In some ways this piece breaks barriers of a gendered [and racialized] corporeality. I think it both simultaneously highlights the male gaze on gendered bodies (final reveal in striptease performance) but at the same time subverts it, the pasties representing the sexual pleasure of a gendered body. This pleasure is at the center in such a large scale, they are not to be ignored and they are not to be underestimated. Questions I have for the artist: What has been your favorite medium(s) to work with? If you can point to a work or piece that you feel captures the essence of who you are as an artist and what you stand for, which one or ones would it be? What are some current projects you are working on?