Week 6

Looking through Xandra Ibarra's website, I really enjoyed the simplicity of the design. The portrait of her draped in royal blue was especially powerful and iconic. I loved the animation clicking through her website. I was immediately drawn to the category, "sculptures" because I feel that socially we are lead to think that the only art that can fit under this category are greek sculptures. I gravitated the most to the sculpture titled, Side by Side (Couple), because I have started to gain an interest in the way that artists portray and depict love. I think that this piece was exceptional in the way that it took two raw and natural objects such as the carcass of cockroaches and used it as a metaphor for eternal love. This idea of taking the dead cockroaches that died together in her Mother's house may allude to the idea that you can find love in the strangest of places, but as long as that love is strong it will preserver and seem to last eternities. I believe that he putting these dead insects on top of rhinestones really set the tone of how precious and beautiful partnerships are. I believe that she had to equate the love that these roaches share with the riches and opulence. I also absolutely love the way that she described that them dying together was an example of the most "capacious form of sharing." I feel that this romanticizes the idea of live that it goes beyond this material world and defies death. I also feel that this is also why it was so important for her to use cockroaches in this context. For insects like these to die together and share the moments of death with each other, it really does show how impactful love can be.