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Mario Ybarra is a versatile artist: performer, designer, sculptor, painter and
activist, capable of merging street culture with art history to produce “a from of
contemporary art filtrated by his Los Angeles experience as an American of
Mexican origin.” Ybarra, in fact, belongs to a generation of artists of Mexican
origin who play and mock stereotypes and prejudices tied to their identity.
Constant source of inspiration for Ybarra’s installations is the rich and
complex culture of South California in which a heterogeneous mix of
inhabitants, ethnic groups and an articulated post-colonial history, blend with
a unique rap and street culture. Through his interventions, the artist unveils
unknown aspects of ‘latino’ cultural history (term used to tag the communities
originating from centre and South America), appropriating pop images as well
as multi-cultal ones. Like the installation Sweeney Tate, presented at Tate
Modern in 2007; the re-creation on a 1:1 scale of a barber shop, equipped
with mirrors, checked floors, barber armchairs, varied furnishings and white,
red and blue striped decorations, which Ybarra animated through a fantastic
haircutting challenge amongst barbers of different nationalities.
The exhibition Wilmington Good is structured as an informal portrait of his
neighbourhood, Wilmington. The title is taken from a shut down second-hand
car dealer close by the artist’s home, and plays with the fact that there is
nothing exceedingly good about a place intoxicated by refineries and invaded
by dockyards.
Ybarra creates in the exhibition space a three-dimensional landscape in which
ten cranes of different sizes and colours are disseminated; the sculptures
resemble huge toys for children and seem to bring to life the city’s skyline as
seen from the dockyards. A large painting becomes the background, offering
a night vision of a refinery that ceaselessly discharges smoke from its
chimneys. Smoky City represents a monstrous future city, Blade Runner style,
in which there is no trace of human being.
The citizens of Wilmington appear in six monumental photographs; these
images on a black background are structured like tableau vivants that
ironically represent the historical conflicts and the emancipation of
dockworkers. Drawn from a famous murales realised in the ‘70’s at
Wilmington, these photographs transpose the conflicts of the Latin community
to today. Ybarra transforms the class struggle into a gang fight, showing two
blindfolded young men that fight with a knife and then make peace, shaking
hands. The eagle, symbol of American freedom, which, in the murales brakes
the chains freeing the labourers, in the photographs is trapped by the chains;
similarly the artist’s mother, working in the Los Angeles dock, the biggest
cargo dock of the United States, is depicted as being relentlessly enchained
to her job. This exhibition as a whole can’t be reduced to an autobiographical
narrative as it goes beyond national and ethnic specificities, talking, with
powerful irony about global issues.
Mario Ybarra Jr. (1973) has completed an MA in Fine Arts at the University of
California, Irvine, in 2001. Amongst his most important exhibitions is his solo
show at the Art Institute of Chicago (2008) and at the CCA Wattis Institute for
Contemporary Arts at San Francisco (2007), as his participation at the
Whitney Biennial, New York (2008), at the 3rd Prague Biennial (2007), his
special project for the Tate Modern (2007) and the exhibition at the
Serpentine Gallery (2006), both in London. Since 2002 Ybarra runs an
educational social centre and a studio lab that operates by coordinating
installations and performances, events, residences and workshops to extend
the knowledge of art to a broader, non-professional public.
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