Source: Daily Breeze
A free art exhibition that sheds light on the impact of prison on incarcerated individuals and their families will be available for public viewing at Cal State Dominguez Hills starting Saturday, Sept. 30.
“Personal, Small, Medium, Large, Family,” an installation by Mario Ybarra Jr., will run through Dec. 8 at the University Art Gallery. A public opening reception is scheduled for 3 to 6 p.m. Saturday.
“Mario Ybarra’s work uses the everyday to make his audience reconsider big concepts such as mass incarceration,” said Aandrea Stang, director of CSUDH’s University Art Gallery. “His work makes it personal, and makes those that experience the installation stop and think.”
Ybarra Jr. was born in Los Angeles in 1973 and currently lives in Wilmington. He graduated from the Otis College of Art and Design with a bachelor’s degree in 1999. He went on to receive a master’s degree in fine arts from UC Irvine in 2001.
Through sculptures, installations and community-based projects, Ybarra Jr. examines the experiences of Mexican Americans living in Southern California. His work also looks at excluded social norms often by combining narratives, histories and complete environments.
His works have been showcased at venues such as Pasadena City College’s Boone Family Art Gallery, The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia and Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum.
He has also been featured at local, national and international exhibitions/fairs, including the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the Tate Museum in London, the Orange County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
The CSUDH exhibition will explore mass incarceration by drawing on Ybarra Jr’s own experiences of watching a childhood friend who went to prison as a teenager.
It includes interview footage from the friend, who spent 32 years in prison, and scale images in the installation of Red West Pizzeria, a pizza restaurant in Wilmington where Ybarra Jr. and his friend dined as children in the 1970s and 1980s.
If you go
What: “Personal, Small, Medium, Large, Family,” a free art exhibition by Mario Ybarra, Jr.
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday, and noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays from Sept. 30 to Dec. 8.
Where: The University Art Gallery at CSUDH, 1000 E. Victoria St.
Information: gallery.csudh.edu.
