accolades

“Her multimedia sculptures, videos, and performances reckon with the satirization of self in a world that too effectively packages and consumes our identities for the sake of optics and institutional control.”

—Alex Santana, ARTnews

“Ibarra’s boundary-pushing work across art and activism bestows a distinctly queer vision of the future: fucked up, rough around the edges, and beautiful beyond imagination.”

—Genny Wood, Wussy Mag

“It’s hard not to be moved by the labour Xandra has invested in these sculptures. Each piece, whether metal or silicone, is entirely fabricated by her hands and suffused with the kind of care one finds in Bob and Sheree’s work, and in BDSM as a whole. The leather massaged for hours, bringing vivid colour to its surface; the steel painstakingly polished. Each material Xandra presents invokes how it’s been shaped by a body, and how it might be used to shape other bodies in return. Each sculpture reanimates the past performance practices that fill her own work: with a phantom voluptuousness; an interdependence of sensation.”
—Trisha Low, Frieze Magazine

“Ibarra navigates the “pitfalls” of sex-positive feminism by laughing in the face of respectability politics…Down to the last detail, Ibarra is deeply thoughtful in presenting “Forever Sidepiece,” a [solo] exhibit of lush and inventive works that overflow with whip-smart critique. Ibarra not only expresses herself with humor and urgency, she creates her own cosmos.”
– Vanessa Thill, Cultured Mag

“Ibarra’s performances are both an extension of and a departure from Jose´ Esteban Muñoz’s widely heralded formulation of disidentification: The moment of her falling apart is precisely the moment she comes back into her racialized identity—her fucked life.”
—Andy Campbell, Artforum

“Ibarra entered the sack and engaged in a seemingly masturbatory episode with the wigs, ballerina slippers, pearls, and furs inside. The moment conjured the radicality of a queer downtown culture and New York communities largely lost to time—we were back in the Clit Club of the ’90s—and it was impressive that the event felt not nostalgic but living.”
—Maika Pollak, Aperture

“Large-scale artworks by the likes of Koons, Christopher Wool and El Anatsui were rendered stagnant and dead when juxtaposed with Ibarra’s lively presence, fleshy body and hysterical laughter.”
— Tricia Tongco, Huffington Post

“La Chica Boom pushes at the boundaries of the term “queer,” advocating for a broader application of the word than in reference to sexuality alone.”
— Kate Conger, SF Weekly

“A puissant abstraction, seriously unsettling and completely mesmerizing in her vaguely menacing flirtation with her audience…”
– Robert Avila, SF Bay Guardian

“… provocative, edgy pieces at which the artist, community organizer, and neo-burlesque performer excels.”
— Anna Pulley, East Bay Express

“Seductively Subversive”
—CURVE Magazine

“Call it [FML] a doomy dive that somehow simultaneously strives for transcendence or transformation.”
—Kimberly Chun, SF Gate

“Ibarra’s sharp and raunchy political burlesque channels rage and despair, dejection and defiance, from within concentric circles of representation, both social and aesthetic.”
—Robert Avila, SF Bay Guardian

“brilliant, hot and saucy”
— Annie Sprinkle

“piñata-fisting provocateur”
— SF weekly

“A woman that is oblivious to the pull of the ordinary and dives fist first”
– Autostraddle

“political and sexy at the same time”
– Seattle Gay News