ABOUT THE WORK

A selection of photographic works that feature vacuum-sealed costumes as artifacts of exhaustion, byproducts, sloughed off material, and shed skin.  The works enact a voided site for spectrally conjuring Ibarra’s body without an image—effecting incorporeal gestures of the self. These costumes as skins are thrown-off, separated, and become haunted forms of a former character—La Chica Boom.

The solo exhibition of the same name was exhibited at Black and White Projects in 2016. The work is part of an ongoing negotiation of aesthetic transformation. By sealing and photographing these costume carcasses, Ibarra archives the packaging of her live performance works that she came to call “spictacles.”

These photographs echo the kinds of preservations and categorizations that fill the walls of natural history museums. As such, the molted costumes function as a related fragment to the “Spic Ecdysis” series by Xandra Ibarra where she aligns herself with the figure of the cucaracha.