Border crossing Mexican glass artists’ work breaks down boundaries

When Einar and Jamex de la Torre were kids they would run their Matchbox cars over a table depicting the
Aztec calendar.
Years later the brothers are still bringing pop and ancient culture together, only now it is in the form
of art work they describe as hyper Baroque.
The brothers have been working in the glassworks at Bowling Green State University School of Art this
week, demonstrating their craft and interacting with art students there.
Wednesday afternoon they worked with BGSU students and faculty fashioning a large glass pig with two
devil faces on its posterior, and in the last tongue a long, twisting red tail.
Their work celebrates and dissects the collision of cultures that occurs in the borderland between
southern California and their native Mexico.
Born in Mexico, they moved to southern California in 1972. That meant, Einar de la Torre explained, at a
talk in the BGSU glassworks Tuesday going from an all-boys Catholic school in Mexico to a public co-ed
high school, complete with girls in mini-skirts.
Educated at the California State University at Long Beach, they started out creating flame-worked
figures, but by the 1990s, they had devoted themselves to working as studio artists. They continue to
maintain studios and homes on both sides of the border.
They call their work hyper-Baroque because it draws on the vibrant art of Pre-Columbian Mexico as well as
the Catholic Baroque art of the Spanish colonists, and now the crazy-quilt images of American pop
culture.
Their work uses glass, ceramics, video, digitally manipulated images, glass resins and a myriad of found
objects, from traditional Mexican bean pots to plastic figures of wrestlers, and Matchstick cars.
"We love that pop culture stuff," Jamex de la Torre said. "That’s what feeds our
work."
Those images are used for depictions of Our Lady of Guadalupe or the Aztec Calendar.
Their subject matter is sometimes grim, such as the deadly toll of drug smuggling and illegal
immigration.
"We deal with some of that stuff in our work," Einar Jamex said. "Sometimes we do it in a
tongue-in-cheek manner to make people laugh. We use the humor to bring people into our work."
Recently they’ve been creating public sculpture in places such as the Phoenix convention center, a San
Jose shopping mall and the San Diego International Airport.
Jamex de la Torre acknowledged that "you can’t be completely free in public art but it’s a good way
of putting art in people’s faces who wouldn’t go to a museum."
At the shopping center, they even installed a large sculpture based on a Pre-Columbian figure, but
carrying a shopping bag.
"We got away with something," Jamex de la Torre said.
They also create large installations for museums. These, they said, are impractical in a way because
"eventually the museum wants its wall back," Einar de la Torre said, and they end up having to
haul away and store the elements of the work.
Those may very well get recycled into another piece.
One such piece, at a University of Southern California gallery, turns a squat Olmec head into a lunar
landing vehicle. The eyes play a video of the poet Quincy Troupe performing a monologue about the Olmec,
a culture that pre-dated the Aztecs. The moon’s craters are created using old tires.
Glass faculty Nadine Saylor and Scott Darlington said the brothers brought more than a concern for the
craft of glassmaking to their work with students.
Though Einar said they are proud of their status as craftsmen, they emphasized the artistic content of
the work, Darlington said.
The brothers will continue to work at BGSU today and Friday, and are expected to take part in a
demonstration with glass artist John Miller, who will also visit the university starting today, at
Firenation, 7166 Front St., Holland Friday at 7 p.m.