TONIGHT: San Francisco-based artist Chris Lux’s solo exhibition Give Me Some Peppermint Freedom opens at Jancar Jones Gallery. Lux’s work was accorded this week’s SFBG Pick for his “new rave sensibility.” 6-9pm, free. Through July 18th.

OMG Gallery Aferro Benefit preview, see below for additional details. 6-8pm

Saturday, June 20th: OMG Aferro Art Party Benefit. Gallery Aferro founders Evonne Davis and Emma Wilcox have been consistently supporting and producing some of the strongest emerging artists’ projects that The Totam has come across in recent years. Funds from the sale of artist-donated artworks and crafts at this inaugural benefit event will be used to cover the costs of finalizing Aferro’s status as a non-profit organization. We strongly urge tri-state residents to enjoy an entertaining evening and buy some fantastic work to support an organization promoting a thriving community of artists in and beyond the Newark area.

Everything is Terrible: The Movie premieres at The Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles. This full-length feature by the group of friends responsible for the popular Everything is Terrible website and YouTube channel promises to be a comic videoclip mashup of weird and epic proportions. One night only. Accompanied by a screening of the 1994 softcore classic, Dinosaur Island. 10:30pm, $10. Tickets here.

Monday, June 22nd: catch Afternoon, the solo project of singer-songwriter Krista Warden at the new Williamsburg music venue Bruar Falls, with Drew Victor. Warden’s accordion, guitar, and bittersweet honky-tonk-tinged vocal sensibility has graced collaborations with fellow Brooklyn notables Drew Victor, Beastheart and Sharon van Etten. 9pm, free.

Tuesday, June 23rd: The opening of X-Initiative’s No Soul For Sale: A Festival of Independents. X has invited more than 30 international nonprofit art spaces to travel to New York City to present themselves, their programs and the artists they support. 1-9pm, RSVP here. Through June 28th.

In conjunction with No Soul For Sale, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) will be unveiling a temporary video project space on X’s ground floor which will be open to the public, bringing new works by emerging artists into dialogue with rarely seen historical treasures from the EAI archives for the summer. Character Witness, the launch program for EAI’s project space, includes works by Kalup Linzy, Alex Bag, Michael Smith, MICA-TV, Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, and Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. 6pm, free. Through September 2009.

Tags: Aferro, Afternoon, Beastheart, Bruar Falls, Chris Lux, clips, Dinosaur Island, Drew Victor, EAI, emerging artists, Emma Wilcox, Everything Is Terrible, Evonne Davis, Gallery, Give Me Some Peppermint Freedom, Jancar Jones, Krista Warden, movie, Newark, No Soul for Sale, non-profit, OMG, SFBG, Sharon Van Etten, Silent Theater, summer, temporary, video, Williamsburg, X Initiative.

A transparent curtain slowly descends on the actress who uses her own blood to rouge her cheeks. She emits the violin from her throat, contorts her body to interpret the last line and with the mirrored glasses called for in the script, stares without a single blink at the hundred eyes lodged in the fourth wall.

Avelardo Ibarra, from Clandestine Theatre

Veronica Ibarra’s photographs defy definition. Like a sinister Dare Wright, one well-versed in the alchemical imagery of Cocteau and Anger, Ibarra carefully constructs scenes of glamour, her characters poised in fixed penny arcade moments of tantalizing possibility. Under her gaze, subjects become denizens of the artist’s indeterminate dreamworld, whether they be innocent babies or decadent performers. But the fantastic nature of Ibarra’s work belies the hard-won magic wrought from her steamer trunk of traveling vaudeville secrets. 

I spoke to Ibarra about her work and recent travels in late February, upon the publication of her limited edition book, Clandestine Theatre. A series of new images from her collaboration with legendary Transgressive filmmaker Tommy Turner, Beloved Pigs, will be featured in the group exhibition Cosmic Love, which opens at the Show Cave gallery in Los Angeles tonight.

Ibarra’s teenage fascination for the transformative power of makeup, combined with a penchant for the Helter Skelter nightlife prompted a burgeoning interest in documenting fellow artists and performers around downtown Los Angeles. She began drafting her first “guinea pigs” from her circle of friends, making day trips to places like the Angeles National Forest, junk heaps and abandoned buildings to make her first staged portraits.

Following a short stint at Otis College of Art and Design, Ibarra went on to begin a career gilding the faces of the known and aspiring on Hollywood film sets and runways as a makeup artist for MAC Cosmetics. The demand for her talents led to commissions to style and photograph performers at art events for artists like Murakami and Warhol at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA). Despite lucrative offers to continue her career as a stylist in California, however, Ibarra felt drawn to more potent temptations awaiting her in the glittering underbelly of rock and roll, and moved to New York City in 2001.

In New York, Ibarra found kindred spirits in other young performers making a name for themselves in the downtown music scene, including Lady Starlight, Breedlove, and Anna Copa Cabanna. She immersed herself in a nighttime world of the cabaret-going flaneur, and derived new inspiration for her work through her friendships. However, trading her large loft in downtown LA for a tiny tenement apartment in the East Village meant Ibarra was forced to pack away most of her studio gear. Out of practical necessity, she began devising ways to work within the building’s confines, using its historic, cramped hallways and atmospheric darkness to produce her first body of work, 60 Avenue B, a semi-biographical series of portraits of her friends. The photographs pay a kind of fictional homage to recent generations of artists celebrated and unknown, Factory-era divas and dandies whose ghosts continue to haunt the neighborhood.

Joel-Peter Witkin also used a lot of masks as well, and I’m a really big fan of his stuff. So I’ve always had little masks. And I’ve always felt that photographs seem a little more mysterious when you have props, or separate elements that make you wonder what they’re doing there and why, why they’re wearing that– I’ve always loved that sort of costumed style.

- Veronica Ibarra

Ibarra’s ingenuity with props and styling is even more readily apparent in her next series of images, Los Cuentos de Hadas (The Fairytales). The lush backdrops and Babylonian costumes that drape her models constitute a mysterious opium den of riches, a world of masquerade where one moves seamlessly from a Louise Brooks doppelganger to a pair of 19th century Parisian streetwalkers. Each group of photographs in this series have their own unique visual identity, so I was floored to learn that the gorgeous vignettes had all been shot in the same 10×10′ space in her apartment. The variations in look were accomplished on an almost non-existent budget with nothing more than a change of costume and clever drapery, all recycled items Ibarra finds in thrift shops, stored in a small bedside trunk. Her practical resourcefulness with artifice and her ability to fully realize illusions of otherworldly debauchery is something that deeply impressed me. It is inspiring that money and space are no obstacle to the spirit which drives Ibarra to undertake her work, and that there is seemed to be no spectacle that she could not effect through utilitarian means.

Along with Los Cuentos de Hadas and 60 Avenue B, Ibarra’s photographs of musicians from Genesis P.Orridge to Jon Spencer attracted additional attention from fashion and art circles. She began collaborating on photographic projects with artists like Tora Lopez and Emiliano Maggi, Carmen Hawk, Joanne Burke of Chromium Dumb Belle, and Tommy Turner. Ibarra recently traveled with Lopez and Maggi to New Orleans, where she documented their KK Projects installation, Modern Witchcraft at the Prospect 1 Biennial. 

Turner, whose film Where Evil Dwells with David Wojnarowicz is a seminal work of the Cinema of Transgression era, plays Ibarra’s lover and muse in her new series, Beloved Pigs. In a hallucinatory, blue-tinged dream sequence, the artists blur the boundary between fiction and reality when Ibarra performs the very real act of mutilating Turner’s body in her photographs.  

Veronica Ibarra is currently working on a series of self-portraits, one of which is the title image on her new blog, La Bella Memoria. Highlights of Ibarra’s last decade of work has been collected and self-published by the artist in the new volume, Clandestine Theatre, available for special order by email through her website.

(All photos in this piece are courtesy of the artist, except where noted.)

Veronica Ibarra Photography

Cosmic Love at Show Cave Gallery, April 18-25, 2009

La Bella Memoria

Glitter and Starz

Blitz Kids

Tags: 60 Avenue B, Anna Copa Cabanna, apartment, artists, Beloved Pigs, Blitz Kids, book, cabaret, Carmen Hawk, Chromium Dumb Belle, Clandestine Theatre, collaboration, Cosmic Love, costumes, East Village, emerging artists, Emiliano Maggi, Genesis P.Orridge, Glitter and Starz, Helter Skelter, installation, Joanne Burke, Joel Peter Witkin, Jon Spencer, KK Projects, La Bella Memoria, Lady Starlight, Los Cuentos de Hadas, makeup, MoCA, Modern Witchcraft, music, New Orleans, nightlife, performers, photographers, photographs, portraits, props, Prospect 1 Biennial, Show Cave, studio, Tommy Turner, Tora Lopez, Veronica Ibarra,  Breedlove.