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Mario Ybarra Jr. navigates the complex terrain of
politics, pop culture, and racial identity with a deft and often
slyly humorous touch. Titled with a nod to a gruesome Sam Peckinpah
film about a Mexican manhunt, the Los Angeles artist’s latest
show of drawings and installations pushes his interests in several
provocative directions.
The works coalesce loosely around the image of the
head and its implications of power and control. MVP (2007)
is a tiny clay portrait of the artist in a Dodger’s baseball
cap. Mounted on a wooden plaque like a hunter’s trophy, it
is simultaneously a self-aggrandizing tribute and a decapitation.
In Protest Flag (2006), the finial, or “head,”
of an American flagpole has been replaced with the Mexican national
emblem: a subtle “topping” that turns the flag itself
into a cheeky protest against U.S. jingoism. More circumscribed
yet no less incisive, Where My Dogs At? (2007) is a pair
of “his and hers” spiked leather dog collars embossed
with “Ybarra” and “Helwing” respectively.
Although a bit self-indulgent, it pokes fun at the artist/gallery
relationship while acknowledging its undertones of ownership and
restraint.
Surprisingly, the show’s centerpiece is a work
from 1998, The Ballad of Chalino Sanchez. In this series
of 20 small drawings, Ybarra Jr. provides an impressionistic account
of the life and death of Sanchez, a sometime cross-border drug trafficker
and singer of narco-corridos, contemporary Mexican folk songs celebrating
the exploits of drug smugglers. Reminiscent of racy, brightly colored
Mexican comics, the images depict the Stetson-wearing, gun-toting
Sanchez engaging in murder, drug deals, and rape. We also see him
in other archetypal moments: performing on stage, pimped out on
a record cover, and, incongruously, as a dishwasher. Presented out
of sequence and executed in a loose, casual hand, the drawings feel
almost throwaway, like doodles in a notebook. This deadpan treatment
defuses the impulse to martyr Sanchez and creates an intimacy that
makes him seem more human. In this sense, the work not only reveals
how such extreme acts become the currency of survival for some Mexican
immigrants, but also debunks the glamorization of criminality that
prevents us from seeing beyond stereotypes.
This review originally appeared
in the May 2007 issue of art
ltd. Reprinted with permission.
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