Performance throughout the museum, followed by a conversation with artist and writer Henry Gamboa, Jr. at noon in the Denning Family Resource Center, FREE.

October 20, 2017 at 11:00am

 

Drawing from contemporary painter, John Currin’s painting Laughing Nude (1998), this performance engages the skin and skein of race. Nude and encased in a nylon skin cocoon, the performer examines the vexed relation racialized subjects have to not only one’s own skin, but also one’s own entanglements and knots (skeins) with whiteness and white womanhood. By filling this nude cocoon with paradigmatic “white lady accoutrements” (blonde hair, ballet shoes, furs, pearls, and fake breasts), the performer visualizes and embodies the skein of race, negotiating the simultaneous joys and pains of subjection, abjection, and personhood.

This performance contains nudity.

Xandra Ibarra is an Oakland-based performance artist from the El Paso/Juarez border who performs and works under the alias of La Chica Boom. Ibarra uses hyperbolized modes of racialization and sexualization to test the boundaries between her own body and coloniality, compulsory whiteness, and Mexicanidad. Her practice integrates performance, sex acts, and burlesque with video, photography, and objects. Throughout her multiple works, she teeters between abjection and joy and problematizes the borders between proper and improper racial, gender, and queer subject.

Harry Gamboa Jr. is an artist, writer, and educator. He is the founder and director of Virtual Vérité (2005-2017), the international performance troupe. He is a co-founder of Asco (1972-1985), the Los Angeles-based performance group, a faculty member of the Photo/Media Program at California Institute of the Arts, and a lecturer with the Chicana/o Studies Department at California State University, Northridge. His work has been exhibited by museums + galleries + art spaces nationally/internationally.