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.

Alex Bag, still from GladiaDaters, 2005, video. 30 minutes. Image courtesy Elizabeth Dee Gallery

I became a fan of Alex Bag’s too-infrequently seen work while in art school, the moment I saw her biting, too-close-to-home impression of an art school student in Untitled Fall ‘95. Bag’s unerring ability to observe and recreate the awkwardly humorous, often inappropriate moments that lurk behind the walls of our public personas is one of the reasons her newly-commissioned video installation for the Whitney Museum is a must-see.

The work opened to the public this past weekend in the lobby gallery of the museum, and is comprised of a large single-channel video screening continuously on one wall, with viewer seating made up of large, primary-colored low blocks atop a giant white shag rug in the center of the room.  In a corner stands a desk, puppet and wheelchair used in the video. (side note: Pipilotti Rist also designed participatory, comfortable seating that was conducive to lingering for her recent exhibit at MoMA, a trend I’m hoping will carry over to more lengthy video installations.)

Carol Corbett, from the Carol Corbett show. Image courtesy Bill Cappello.

The video consists of several interconnected segments inspired by a 1970s children’s syndicated television show, The Patchwork Family, and its predecessor, The Carol Corbett Show. Both shows were hosted by Bag’s mother, sitting behind a desk with a puppet; Alex was a guest on the show as a child. Bag herself plays host in her new work, which includes real children but subverts the familiar tropes of children’s television programming by introducing dark themes and adult subjects.

Alex Bag, still from Coven Services - Demo Reel, 2004, DVD with sound, 19 minutes. Image courtesy Elizabeth Dee Gallery

I was only able to catch about 40 minutes of the video, which included scenes of a depressed, suicidal Bag being verbally abused by a sadistic red dragon puppet, a children’s fingerpainting session with a lighthearted Bag dressed in a leotard, a guest musician in a wheelchair leading a sing-and-play-along, and best of all, Bag in a black gothic dress and wig reading a violent novel aloud to three young children superimposed onto footage of apocalyptic destruction. Among the additional characters in the piece that I did not get to see are an animal wrangler, a wizard, and a psycho-pharmacologist, according to the press release. Another visit is definitely warranted.

On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Related: Alex Bag on her new work, in last week’s Artforum.com

Tags: Alex Bag, Art, art school, artforum, Carol Corbett, children, contemporary, installation, kids, Museum, Patchwork Family, puppet, show, video, Whitney.