(audience murmuring) - Welcome everyone to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.

(audience applauds) Hello, welcome to the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker series.

My name is Christina Hamilton, the series director.

Today we present artists and lenticularists, the De La Torre brothers.

Hopefully they're bringing some warmth.

I know I'm impressed with all of you who made it here today.

I know we are really hitting that cold spot now.

I wanna thank our partners for their support of today's program, the Institute for Humanities, and Detroit Public Television, and Michigan Radio 91.7 FM.

And I wanna encourage everybody here if you have not already done so, the Institute for the Humanities Gallery the current installation there, "The Fight" by Salvador Diaz, you must see it.

It's quite something and it is quite something to be in as a viewer.

It's a 46 foot panoramic oil on canvas painting in the round.

You stand in the center of the picture and you become the fighter.

So it gives you a different perspective on subjectivity.

This is up through December 9th at the Institute for Humanities on Fair.

And students, a reminder, there is money up for grabs.

Songs for Democracy collaborative competition seeks entries, songs with accompanying cover art for all of you visual artists out there.

This is collaborative student teams can enter to win a $3,000 grand prize and a full music video production at the U of M Video Studios.

Submissions are due December 1st.

So all that extra time you have next week on your break, you can make that submission.

Details are at speakactvote.umich.edu.

Please remember to turn off your cell phones.

We will have a Q&A today right here in this room.

We'll go right from the talk into the Q&A.

You'll see there's microphones at the ends of these two aisles here, so anyone with questions can come up and line up in the microphones and ask your questions.

And for those students who have evening classes and must rush off, please do so quietly.

We find ourselves in a season of leadership change and renewal from our Congress on down.

Here at the University of Michigan, we have our newly installed U of M President Ono.

And we also have new leadership at the Stamps School and our newly appointed dean, and he has graciously agreed to introduce our speakers today.

Yeah, it's great.

It's gonna be great to have him here on the Penny Stamps stage.

He comes to us from the University of California at Davis as an accomplished artist, a professor, an experienced administrator.

His own creative work reflects community engaged cultural practices of social justice, and his strength of purpose promises to serve us well.

Please welcome the Stamps School Dean, Carlos Francisco Jackson.

(audience applauding) - Thank you, Christina.

Thank you all for you who are here today.

It's so wonderful to be inside a warm room, so thank you.

Allow me just to jump into the introduction and then provide a brief personal anecdote, if you will.

It's so wonderful today to have collaborating artists and brothers, Einar and Jamex De La Torre.

They have developed their signature style of mixed media work with blown glass sculpture and lenticular printing through years of working together.

Their pieces represent a multifaceted view of life that reflects a complex and humorous aesthetic that could be seen as baroque.

Their influences range from religious iconography to German expressionism, and they often pay homage to Mexican, vernacular, and pre-Columbian art.

Born and raised in Guadalajara, Mexico in the early 1960s until their family moved to California, or California as I called it growing up.

In 1972, going from a traditional Catholic school to a small California beach town, they both attended California State University at Long Beach where Jamex got a BFA in sculpture, while Einar decided against the utility of an art degree.

The brothers now live and work on both sides of the border in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico, and San Diego, California, California.

The complexities of the immigrant experience and contradicting bi-cultural identities as well as their current life and practice on both sides of the border, inform their narrative and aesthetics.

The brothers' current exhibition, "Collidoscope: De La Torre Brothers Retrospective," organized in partnership with the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Latino and the Riverside Art Museum is now on view at the newly open Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture in Riverside, California.

When it closes there early next year, the exhibition will embark on a national tour.

The retrospective features more than 70 mixed media works, including blown glass sculptures and installation art.

Plus some of the artist's latest lenticulars with imagery that changes as the viewer moves.

The brothers have also had 19 solo museum exhibitions in six different countries, completed eight major public art projects, and have participated in four biennials.

The brothers are recipients of the USA Fellowship Award, the San Diego Art Prize, the Lewis Comfort Tiffany Award, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award among others.

As a brief personal note, I was at a point in my career about five, seven years ago when I was at a crossroads, and I was looking to renew my practice and I was confronting how to manifest my work in new ways, continue growing to stay hungry, to never give up on building for the future, and I was looking for a way in order to renew.

And I decided to enroll back in graduate school while I was holding a full-time job and I had a family.

And in that it was a very kind of unusual experience for myself and somewhat uncomfortable being already established kind of faculty member going back to graduate school.

It was quite strange.

And in the first day that I started in the first seminar, I met another person who was almost like me, who had a practice, a family, and was going back to graduate school in order to renew their practice.

Her name was Maria Esther Fernandez, and it was very strange because I had known her partner many years before.

We had never met and we were both interested in writing about the same artist, Celia Herrera Rodriguez.

And Esther and I then developed a lifelong friendship who I now consider my best friend and who I miss very much now that I'm no longer in California.

It would turn out that Esther would around the same time that I was... Well a little before, but right around the same time I was being interviewed for this position here to serve as dean of the Penny W. Stamps School of Art Design, Esther was also being interviewed to become the artistic director lead curator at the new Cheech, which had not yet opened yet.

And it would turn out that the first exhibition that Esther would help the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art and Culture at the Riverside Art Museum launch would be this exhibition by the De la Torre brothers.

And I'm using this moment as an affirmation while I've still working to become a community member here with you all, and find ways to meaningfully support you as an affirmation of that my path is in the right direction.

I would like to thank Christina and creator for bringing these forces together and giving me the opportunity to welcome wonderful, incredible, dynamic and artists who while I just met, I feel I have a deep spiritual connection too.

So thank you.

Let's welcome the De La Torre brothers.

(audience applauding) - Good evening.

- [Audience] Good evening.

- First of all, I wanna thank you all for coming.

It's a good amount of people considering this winter started.

I don't know.

We're from California, Baja California so this is winter to us.

Anyway, we also of course want to thank the Penny Stamps series, and Christina and of course Carlos for the wonderful introduction.

- Yes, thank you all for coming.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So this is Einar and I'm Jamex, and a little bit of what we feel like we need to do as artists is to demystify a little bit of how we got there because we were once our students ourselves.

- Not going further.

Sorry.

- It's started.

Okay, this is a scene of the inside of our studio in Baja California in Mexico.

It's a studio that we built framing this gigantic oak tree that we're blessed with.

We're in a valley with a lot of very large oak trees.

- And the clicker's going a little slow for me.

It's buzzing, but it's not communicating with that.

I don't know if we need to click the next slide because this isn't running so well.

So this is Infinada Baja California.

It's a town about an hour south of Tijuana.

It's the closest to the Valle de Guadalupe where that studio that my brother just showed you is.

So this is where we go to get seafood and groceries.

If this clicks work.

I mean, nope.

So this is the border, for those of you who are not aware, this is the wall that they keep talking about.

It seems pretty silly when you see it.

It looks the same on both sides.

Another view, this is, it might start working.

This is the wall actually going into the Pacific Ocean.

On the right side is Playa de Tijuana, or what they lovingly call Playami.

It's hard to think of a more surreal scene personally.

Yeah, with a bullfighting ring and then on the left side, that's the United States.

It's really the corner of the country, and basically the community that's there it's called San Isidro.

It's a community that is in related to San Diego, but there's still two small cities between that one and San Diego, and that would be National City and Chula Vista.

- [Jamex] Oh no.

- Technical difficulties.

Please bear with us.

- Sorry.

- We can return it over there if we need to do a shorter HDMI.

- Yeah.

- So we're gonna talk about a couple things in the meantime as artists and we will launch into our own work.

One of the things that we always get asked is, you know, how did you start being an artist, and you know, why be an artist when the world is already full of things?

Why are you making more things?

Which is a good question.

I think that craft and arts have to answer this question.

You have to always be vigilant that you have a good voice and you wanna talk about something.

You have to say something, whether it's talking through the medium or the medium talking for you.

You have to have that.

And also why show art?

Another great question.

Because it is after all the kind of individualistic thing you launch into your own work, and I think the answer to that for us is that you need to learn about what you make, you need to listen to other people and tell you about what you made.

Because as an artist, you think about all these things and possible interpretations, but you do not necessarily have them all.

And that's when you need to listen to the viewers because it's really up to them in the end.

You already thought about what your art means, but it's up to them to tell you things that you may not know about what you did.

And the beauty of that is that after all you end up, you end up richer by different interpretations of your own work and you can incorporate that into your own work because it enriches you back.

And that's the reason that you wanna exhibit art work is to learn about what yourself.

- So when we first got outta college, we were totally clueless of what to do next because we had assignments, we seemed to have purpose in being in a school.

But when you're out there, you have to give yourself your assignments.

You have to plow on with this unreasonable faith that something will turn out.

In the long run, what make the most difference to us was finding the mentorship of a dear friend, Thurman Statum, and working in his studio, seeing what he did in his studio.

So to us that's the piece that is missing in our education is how do you witness an artist that actually has a functioning studio, and all the shenanigans that they go through to maintain the studio, to maintain the freedom that they need as artists.

Another mentorship that we had eventually was a gallerist in LA that guided us professionally.

Daniel Saxon, who to us is like a surrogate father in a way.

Our exhibition at the Cheech Museum is dedicated to him for that reason.

- So Daniel Saxon had a gallery in LA.

Through the '90s, it was a very big gallery and he slowly started to focus and specialize on Chicano artists kind of ahead of the curve, if you will.

And when we got in, he was kind of retiring his gallery, it's much smaller.

And he took us on as a pet project because I think he realized that we were challenging because we aren't painters, which the kind of tradition is mostly painting and or muralism.

And I think the fact that we were, you know, blown glass, mixed media, he thought that that was an interesting challenge and believe me, it proved to be challenging because the thing with selling art is that there's genres, you know, and when you don't fall into genres so easily, it's a tougher sell.

But on the other hand, you're trailblazing, you're making your own path and you have to make your case and making your cases turns out to be your life's work.

And that's, you know, kind of where we are.

Oh, we're back.

Brilliant.

So United States is big, and we're down at this little corner over here.

It's just still not working.

Maybe somebody could just click the next 'cause this isn't going... Let's click the next one, and it's off again.

The HDMI.

Anyway, I think that the border, one thing we could say about the border is that it's such a big part of our life that we're crossing the border once a week.

We live in San Diego and we live in Baja California, and this informs our work greatly.

This border crossing, it's a semipermeable membrane.

It's who gets through, who doesn't get through.

The dialogue of the border is really complex.

It really can't be reduced because there's so many stories, so many different reasons.

People go north and people go south that sometimes people talk about it as this, you know, like only one way of immigration.

It's really some people live in Tijuana and work all day in San Diego and drive back to Tijuana every day and sit in traffic just like people do in LA just to cross LA or whatever, or people might do here.

It's just it's their daily grind.

Let's see if we're back.

- No, we're back.

So this is early work as collaborators.

Before we collaborated, we made our own work.

So for the longest time we had exhibitions, a third his work, a third my work, and a third collaborative work.

So this is what we sarcastically called Rasquatcha period.

So it's a little bit of a rougher style.

On the left side, it's a Baja Cali.

It's a six foot high mixed media piece with a blown glass sculpture on the top.

- [Einar] And on the right side is called "Temuk."

Temuk's feet were burned by Cortes because he was greedy and wanted more gold.

And here we have very tongue in cheek, put him in a barbecue and his vest is a Honda motorcycle gasoline tank.

So you get a little perspective on scale.

The only blown glass on this is the head, and on the left one, it's the Coatlicue piece at the top as well.

Next slide.

- So we like to show how we use drawings to start all our projects.

So everything starts with a little sketch.

In this case, sculpture on the left side called the Bible Belt that we produced in Starworks, North Carolina.

Long glass sculpture over a resin base.

Next.

- And here we have a fly boy and a drawing of we've done several fly boys.

I think we're really interested in the fly as this sort of dirty side of humanity.

So here he is sitting on what I think is a display for product display.

The little LED figure.

It's got some quinceaneras at the bottom also.

I mean, we use a lot of material culture in our work.

That is sort of the anthropological term for the objects that comprise our daily use.

And I think that we're really interested in these.

We don't really like the term found object because it's not like we just, you know, like trash that you just find on the ground.

We seek material culture that goes with our work for our mixed media.

And that's a good example of that, as are the quinceanera figurines that are at the bottom of it.

Next.

- This is a rather large glass piece, it's about this high.

We made it at the Glass Museum in in Tacoma where there is the best glass working team to work with.

So the piece is made with an Italian technique called Radicello.

So in a sense, it's also fair to ask us why bother with high glass as a sculpting medium if we are sculptors.

And the answer for that is that glass is simply the most spontaneous medium in sculpture.

In two days, you have sculpture that's completely polished in full color with all this coloring techniques.

In two or three days, it's out of the oven.

Next.

- This is Tanke You.

We love tongue in cheek titles like that.

It's a piece made in a Rochester school of craft years ago.

We do a lot of work when we'd visit universities.

Recently, we did some work in Portugal University and for us, we visit probably almost all the major programs in the United States.

And that's part of our practice is to make work while we're visiting artists.

Next.

- A mixed media sculpture on the left side called Meclantaculi with a long glass sugar skull.

Long glass to us it's a lot like sugar.

So when we're kids we have this sugar skull that were given to you in the day of the dead.

- And the bottom part is Terracotta, which is a ceramic.

We've also done residencies in ceramic and love to also use the pliable earth.

On the right is La Astronauta.

He's stoned, very stoned.

His eyes are dilated.

Binoculars are a perfume bottle, an Avon bottle that is just incredibly bad if you open it and it's incredible.

And the bottom has a lunar lander scene with Jesus Malverde.

So there's a little bit of the narco side of that.

Next slide.

- [Jamex] Two blown glass sculptures.

Don't remember the title of this one.

- Yeah, it's Lucha Luve De Pernal and that's because the obsidian knife in his hand.

is a cuchillo de pernal in the part of the Aztec objects that were found years later that has... We always love the fact that this obsidian knife that is kind of, you know, it's for sacrifice and all this has this sort of googly eye on it and this face that's kind of cute and is gonna cut your heart out.

And we love that kind of play with the absurdity of things.

And on the right is, Masa el Diablo which is an old saying about the devil knows more because he's old and because he's the devil.

Next.

- [Jamex] This is 2020 when it used to be that when a year starts, you had a new year represented as a new baby, and the old year walking out as an old man.

So 2020 to us was ominous because of the pandemic and Trump's shenanigans.

So we decided that it had to be a very nasty looking baby.

So to talk about material culture, that baby is at display at a pharmacy probably we found it.

We spotted it at a flea market or something.

We sawed it's head off, not in a grisly matter.

And then we replaced it with a blown glass piece, which is of course of our own manufacture.

The bed is a bed of roses that's cast resin.

My brother knows a lot about casting the resin.

Protects himself very well, of course.

And again, it's 2020 this year that will end up in infamy.

Next.

- Two more blown glass pieces, the eye of the curator on the left side, and on the right side it's piece Tonalli piece, sort of like Tonalli are these little animal series that we're doing that Tonalli is now what for like this animal spirit.

And what we wanted to talk about in this one is the "Recurring Dream" is the title of it.

So it's a very large blown glass piece, which is big for blown glass all done I think at University of Wisconsin.

The chain that for this pull toy is going into its invested in the base.

So this is a way that by calling it the "Recurring Dream," we're using the title which we really enjoy language in our work.

It is talking about how even though it's a pulled toy, you can't pull on it because it's invested into the ground, and how dreams have that quality of wanting to move but also being stuck and you have the frustration.

And this toy is stuck in that way maybe childhood.

Next slide.

- Two more animal Tonalli pieces on the left side is one we did shortly after Prince died.

So it's an homage to Prince.

We made them in that well when we were visiting artists at Fosi in Minnesota and Minneapolis.

Next slide.

- [Jamex] The one on the left side is representative of a series of bottles, drunk bottles, that we've been making over the years.

And this is a rather large bottle, so the bottle is drinking the contents.

- [Einar] And on the right is a ballerina that was a scorpion.

So she's a very sweet ballerina but is now in specimen that's been filled with a little needle through its back.

Next slide.

- So our favorite medium is blown glass.

Like I said earlier, blown glass is a fantastic sculpting medium, but it's also such a pleasure.

If anybody has a chance to try it, it's, you know, to us it's a joy.

We don't have a studio ourselves, so we don't get to work with it that often.

But when we do, we are thoroughly happy in the medium.

And we get asked a lot about collaboration.

Like, what does that mean?

Like we get told, hey, you know, I see my brother once a year in Thanksgiving and we fight and obviously we get along.

I think ours started from glassblowing because when we were learning to blow glass in university, you need help from other people.

And with that help you start saying, well what if you come in and help, you know?

What are your thoughts on what I'm doing?

And we start to learn how to sort of pass it on, the baton so to speak.

We learned early on that you can't do that halfway.

You can't say, you know, go ahead and do whatever you want, but don't ruin it.

You can't have the parking brake on.

Doing artwork is to have freedom and the the other person needs to have the freedom to in if need be ruined, something you did because it's the end, we'll be better off for it.

And it took a little bit and it was rough, but I think we mostly get along.

People ask us if we fight and probably the only times that we do a little bit is when we're blowing glass.

It's such intensity because we have a crew of people, we have furnaces on and we have to be on the same page.

And when we're not, it's kind of a funny moment and one of us relentless because we're not gonna have a drawn out fight.

It's more of a we thought we were doing this and he thought, you know, it's kind of a we just figure out the best thing to do and plow on, Next.

- Another word about collaborating is that we like to say that the idea of the lone creator is over-emphasizing the way art history is read.

I don't think anybody is that alone.

We all have our mates or friends or colleagues, history that we draw from.

So we're all collaborating in a way.

And another point about collaborating that to me is important is that you release from ultimate responsibility, and that is a strange freedom because the pieces gain their own life, their own flow almost by themselves.

It's really liberating.

- And I can blame him if it goes wrong, or he blames me if I'm not in the same room.

These are two pieces done just with both objects that we've pursued, and like that's a washer board on the right from Mexico.

The shoes are ceramic pieces from Delf or personal pieces from Delf, not unlike the exhibition of blue and white that's in the museum here now very much related to that.

Jesus was taken off of a crucifix.

Anyway, you could see that there.

What we did manufacture is the little porky pig is resin cast with a dice inside.

We used a lot of resin casting because you can invest objects into the resin.

Whereas if you try to do that with glass, it's such a high temperature that it would burn out and probably crack and be a mess.

Next slide.

And about collab mixed media, we strongly feel that mixed media doesn't have a place in art education that it should have.

I think a lot of the interesting work that you see in art fairs, there's a lot of mixed media going on.

- [Einar] And biennials is pretty much mixed media.

- So this is the famous Aztec calendar or sunstone in Mexico city.

It's the most ubiquitous symbol of Mexican culture that you will see anywhere.

There's not a single Mexican restaurant that doesn't have somewhere in the walls, the Mexican soccer team has it in the t-shirts, in the coinage.

So it's ingrained, it's tattooed in our brains so the motif can't help to appear and reappear in the way we work.

Next.

- So we have a series of mandalas that are loosely based on the Aztec calendar.

This one that's blown glass in the middle.

Those are resin castings and the backdrop is aluminum.

Next slide you can see a little bit of the detail of the resin castings.

All of those transparent pieces are resin, including the crocodile.

Next slide.

And you can see in this one the depths of it, the blown glass piece is at the top and there's depths to the work that sometimes you need to see from a different angle.

Next slide.

- [Jamex] So this is mitosis with a central blown glass piece.

We do a lot of casting in resin also 'cause he marries glass rather well.

Next slide, Eastern medicine about five feet across.

We wanted to talk about all of those little Virgin de Guadalupe on the perimeter are dressed in kabuki.

So we had just come back from Japan and we wanted to talk about that sort of the androgynous kabuki thing.

All males, you know, playing the female and all of that.

Again, here we have the blown glass, and this one has glass tiles, mostly those are glass tiles inside of the perimeter of the piece.

And the other pieces on the perimeter are resin.

Next.

- [Jamex] So this is again in our studio in Baja California, we're discussing a mixed media piece that includes a lenticular print with a blown glass piece.

- Next.

As you can see, the blown glass piece is a kind of an almond shape.

That is a take off of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is also one of the most important images in Mexican culture is the virgin without the virgin.

So she becomes the portal of life.

We have used that idea for many years now in blown glass.

Next, so I'm gonna talk about lenticulars a little bit.

This is a lenticular.

And so what is a lenticular?

It's an old technology that was around when we were kids, and it used to be as simple as an image cut in to little lines, take half the material out, put another one in, put a plastic lens on it that has long lines on it.

And you see one image and as you move you see the other one.

It's a parallax blocker, meaning that it's like little prisms.

And through this window you see one image and as you move, you'll see the other image and so on.

So why is that a little blurry is because it doesn't take a picture well.

It's 'cause your eyes are stereo vision and a camera's monovision.

So that blurriness doesn't happen when you're in person because you're seeing it with two eyes, as opposed to the camera with one.

Next.

The perimeter of the piece is done with water jet cut aluminum, which we coded with bar top, and those are resin castings.

Next.

And so the lenticular that you saw is made of two images.

There's this one which is Ms. Mito, it's a piece about the mitochondria.

Where we were working with a scientist from the Salk Institute in San Diego that works with mitochondria as a sort of chief investigator.

And this is a young mitochondria, which is like a quinceanera, Ms. Mito.

And then next slide.

As we age, our mitochondria breakout of the cells and they have a lot to do with our aging process, which sucks.

And that is that the cell walls get thinner.

When this pops out, that's supposed to be inside of cells.

It's an energy driver.

If you remember your biology class, it's about an energy in the cell.

The moment it pops out it can wreak havoc.

So here she is, she's not aging well.

The little devils are, you know, beating her up.

And anyway, next slide.

So this is also a rather large lenticular image where the frame is almost eight feet tall.

Another way to look at lenticular is as a Photoshop- - [Einar] Layers.

- Yeah, layering.

So in Photoshop you can layer as much as you want.

In lenticular you can layer up to 20 layers.

So it's an optical illusion that gives you this depth.

You can see the change from one image to the next here, but you can't see the depth.

And what's amazing is when you have a large lenticular, stuff floats out into the space.

People like people are trying to grab the stuff in the space.

It's really quite an amazing effect.

- [Einar] And in the next slide you will see the image on the right.

Next.

Will go from one image to the other.

- [Jamex] As you move laterally.

- So next slide.

That image.

No, one back.

Sorry.

So both of these images are the same image on the wall.

The one thing they have in common is their eyes are in the same spot, but the image goes from this one, which is wildly different than the other one.

This one this piece is called Fimenencia.

And we wanted to sort of talk about the importance and the sort of a reverence to femininity and to feminines.

- So why lenticular in to us?

So at some point in our careers, we came across a big Disney posters that blew us away.

We have always talked about how we wanna layer more and more in terms of media and content, and we collaborate.

We're two people, so our work is layered like an onion.

So lenticular itself just added a bunch of layers in a thin piece of acrylic plastic.

That's why we gravitated totally to it.

- Next.

So we're gonna switch right now to public art.

That's another big part of our practice.

We have what we like to call our studio work, which is gallery work, walls, pedestal work, that kind of stuff, traditional.

Another aspect is public art for us.

So we've been into public art around since the 1999, and why public art?

- Yes, why public art?

It's a hugely limiting way to produce art.

And after all, we're artists and art making has to be about freedom.

That you have to be unencumbered from obligation as much as possible in order for you to be at your best in your opinion.

And public art, obviously you have to go through committees and they have to be satisfied to what they want.

And you have all this structural prerogatives to cover with engineers and architects.

It can be maddening.

- [Einar] On the other hand.

- But public...

Sorry, but public art gives you this incredible audience.

The public is out there and that public probably doesn't go to museums and galleries because the public that goes to museum and galleries is very limited.

- And so this is a 16 foot robot we put in Barrio Logan in San Diego.

Steel with cantena, all the pink stuff is hand carved cantena stone with sort of modernist Mayan glyphs that we devised.

Next slide.

- [Jamex] So we had a big project, what is it, six years ago in Rancho Los Amigos Downey in the hospital.

We made five major pieces including this one, which is 11 feet high.

- And it's a lenticular mandala that moves as you walk by, and the clients that were there every day, they see new things as they go by.

And once it was a few years old, we could get people that tell us I'd walk by this every day and see something new, which is referred to as kind of the Easter egg that all of a sudden you find something.

Even though you walk by it daily, they're still finding things.

And we love that about using lenticular.

Next.

- Another project at the same hospital.

This is 20 feet high.

So you can appreciate it on two different levels.

It also flips from two different images.

- [Einar] Next slide.

Next.

You see the image on the left shows you a little bit of the movement and the scale.

Next slide.

The image on the right is what moves on the image, and this is how we get the proofs from the lenticular printer.

Meaning this is the one that's telling us this is what happens when you move in front of it.

And this is the last proof before they go into printing.

It's a very complicated process because to align the printed image with a lens, and have all of that happen in unison is very complicated.

And we love it but it is a very laborious process.

Next slide please.

- For the same hospital we did a monumental tree.

This is 22 feet high carved stone.

So basically the stone carvers carved their stone, according to a modeling clay model that we made.

So it is the tree of life morphed with a thoracic cage, the ribs, and the nerves coming out, and there's ceramic flowers.

Each one is about this big.

Next.

The next project we had is in San Isidro, that little city I told you about right next to Tijuana on the border.

We got the project to do the library.

So this is their fairly new, it's probably about three years old library of San Isidro.

And those screens are, next slide, they're water jet cut steel very much in papel picado.

Papel picado is that thing that you see in parties and festivals in Mexico where they cut the paper in reams and sort of unfold it, and then it's just very festive, and we wanted to have that festive feel, but also there needs to be a permanence.

So this is steel a foot away from the building.

So it's casting that shadow that you see behind it.

So you see both the steel and the image of it behind.

Next slide.

And here's the other one.

So the other one's about 21 feet wide.

This is 14 to give you scale.

Next.

- Inside the library we made an arch that you have to go through to access the collections in the library.

The arch is topped by carved stone in a mixture of pre-Colombian and Spanish motifs.

The side columns are lenticular.

So as you walk, of course you see the moving and shaping.

As you can see, they spiral up the columns.

- [Einar] Next.

And go ahead and go next.

These are the actual lenticulars and the way that they move as you walk by, Next.

Next, and next.

So walking around the columns of this archway, all of that information is embedded into the images, and that's part of the experience of going to that library.

- In addition to the 3D effect, which of course makes the stuff jump out, like I said earlier.

- Next, a project we did for LA Metro.

We were fortunate enough to get Compton, which is a very interesting line of the blue and the green line.

A community that's a traditional African American and it's now also a lot of Latinos.

So it's a really interesting mix of people that call Compton and Watts is right next to it.

So it's very, very interesting history for Los Angeles.

As you can see there on the bottom part, the fist of black power.

It's a nod to the history of Watts and Compton.

Their community wanted us to talk about it.

There's also a parasol that has the Black Panthers panther, and of course it's Rosa Park.

So the Willowbrook Rosa Park station.

So next slide.

Get a little bit of the scale.

Next.

- So we titled the piece the second line inspired by the parades in New Orleans.

All the parasols are angled differently to offer this feeling of instability and festivity.

- It's four 12 footers, 12 foot high, 12 foot wide parasols and two 14 footers, Next.

So we're really interested in the way that the shadows get cast from this.

Next slide.

But we also have these diamonds embedded 'cause we wanted this water jet cut aluminum to be very like a doilie like something very feminine.

We wanted to talk about Rosa Parks and Rosa, you know, coming home to that station after a long day's work.

We wanted to feel like this is where I wanna go home.

And these little diamonds also add to that sort of broach feel.

And then you could see on the upper right we have Rosa Parks image from the mugshot that is so famous, which of course being at a station for the train, we thought was very, very relevant.

Next.

And you can see there the shadows that these images cast.

Rosa Parks is up in the middle there.

Next.

So this our installation work, perhaps the way that we feel the freest, because I talked about freedom earlier about in terms of public art and how restrictive it is.

And one thing I have to say about public art, we always ask ourselves, what can we get away with in this project?

What can we push through that they won't notice?

You know, maybe it's our nature, but well anyway, in this case, this Aztec calendar sunstone is titled Soy Beaner Adolentandra.

That means a beaner made out of soy, or a bean beaner.

So we first started making this series in the BNL in Porto Alegre in Brazil using exclusively dollar store items.

And when you got a dollar store in Mexico, you find little Virgin Guadalupe, but it's wrong, the wrong color and she's too white, but she's cheap.

So slowly she's changing our culture or any culture that you find something made in a dollar store.

- So it's about who represents your culture.

So the moment we're buying something made on the other side of the world as an interpretation of culture, again, we're going back to material culture and all of those things.

We're certainly not saying it's a bad thing.

It's, you know, you don't buy the Eiffel Tower in Paris made in France even.

It's made somewhere else and it is what it is.

It's a little cheap knockoff to just put on your shelf when you get home.

Here we have the little bit Hindu is sort of shooting out of like an egg in the middle and there's a lot of readings.

Our work has a lot of different possible readings.

Next slide.

- These are the Atlantis of Tula Hidalgo made in Chicla, sort of like an aquarium style.

The one in the right represents the north and the one in the left represents the south.

- And these are nine feet tall.

We made them in the turn of the millennium.

So those TVs are actually actually VCR players.

For those who don't know, there were these big cassettes.

We had to for the cheat show, we had to actually convert everything to digital.

So it was interesting to revive old works like this.

Next slide.

- This one is titled "Maybe."

It is made with a travel trailer kind of carved out to make it into an Olmec head.

If you know what an Olmec head is, these are these colossal heads they found in the Isthmus of Mexico and they're quite big.

They're probably a good 10 feet tall, but they're cut above the neck, which is strange.

So they become a very convenient capsule.

- And we have a video in the eyes that we commissioned a good friend of ours that's a poet, Quincy Troop.

And what we did is we made we cut out and just shot an image of his mouth talking in spoken words.

He's a poet so he wrote a piece, and we sort of moved the camera around so the eyes moved around, and that alone made the piece very animated.

It looked like this piece was alive and talking to you.

And the face itself is made out of a resin, fiberglass resin, and human hair.

In the inside of it of the trailer, we have a little statue of a doll dressed as Miss America, where we did this project in Kansas City and we're really very conscious of about how trailers or tornado magnets and all of that.

Next.

- I think by now you can see that we are the farthest thing from minimalist.

You can call us baroque and we're totally okay with the baroque thing.

When we're students, the minimalist art was so popular, it made us wonder whether how could we ever become artists?

Eventually after school and some years of struggling, we figure out that we had to give ourselves permission to do what we have to do, which was exactly the opposite.

- And by the way, this was 2009 installation in MACLA in San Jose, California.

That's our first lenticular ever, and it is a collaboration with Hans Memling.

We like to joke that we like to work with the old masters because they never say no.

And so in this case, we call this the Reconquista, and Hans Memling Last Judgment by Hans Memlin Triptych has Cortez as the arch angel and he's judging.

And if you don't wanna convert to Christianity, remain Indian and you go to like a hell because obviously they're condemning you to hell.

And on the right side is kind of a bank of Mexico, and all of the sort of celebrities are going there.

So we're making fun of this very class based, race based, you know, judgment out there.

Next.

- So we have had this exhibition, a body of work in Europe that has gone to eight venues.

This one right here is a glass museum in Lommel Belgium.

In the front the piece in the front is a piece made in Oaxaca, Mexico right after the rebellions.

So basically it's a truck full of drunk rabble-rousers.

And you see the glass wall behind is the beginning of a cone that goes up about five stories, and the stairway goes around in double helix.

Next slide.

We made an installation up there in the double helix cone that sticks out above the city.

Next.

And the lenticular wings of the butterfly wink at you as you walk by.

The crucifix butterfly obviously has a myriad of possible readings, not the least of which that there is metamorphosis happening from Jesus from death to resurrection.

And of course the butterflies from worm to butterfly.

Next.

- So the same body of work went to England to Sutherland, to the Glass Museum, National Glass Center in Sutherland.

And here's an example of how we work with wallpaper installations that have blown glass pieces embedded in them, and our regular pedestal and wall work.

Next slide.

And the other side, there's this wallpaper image of the border going into the ocean.

That's an actual image of the border.

And on this side, one back please.

One back, yeah.

On the left side on the Playas la Tijuana, we have a Geronimos Bush.

We've collaborated with him as well, said yes.

And on the other side we have the garden of earthly delights.

And after the distance, the city is San Diego.

Next.

- [Einar] So this is a piece we made for the city of Toulouse, France when they asked us to participate in a festival called Rio Loco.

We reinstalled it in Lommel Belgium again.

That's where we... No, that's actually in England, is it?

- Yeah, and this is the installation in the Glass Center in England.

Next.

That show later went to the National Glass Museum in Netherlands and we did some wallpaper there.

And what we started doing is when we incorporated these images of master paintings probably from Belgium, I think some of those images, we started adding ourselves in there as part of the...

So my brother's there on the left, I'm transgendered into the figure in the middle, and there's a curator with something coming out of his mouth.

Anyway, we are enjoying just sort of the selfie of putting yourself in your own work.

Next.

- And we love the photo murals, and in this case it's a photo mural in the floor because it's a Photoshop document that is a relatively cheap, inexpensive way to completely affect the space.

- And on the right, another photo mural.

You can see we're in there as well.

Jamex, me, Jamex and me up above.

The little heart in the middle, that's blown glass and that's part of it.

And we like the lenticulars, we like playing with depth and what's coming out and what's real and what's two dimensional.

Next.

- So we were invited to participate to do a show in the Glass Museum in Ebeltoft in near Aarhus in Denmark.

They were the cultural city for the year in the European Union so they had funding.

So seven museums decided to do the seven deadly sins, and we got sloth.

And we had a lot to say about sloth.

Next slide.

- We certainly weren't lazy about it.

So we needed some new installations with wallpaper.

These butterflies, these two butterflies here basically have church windows, but as they shift, they turn into kind of, you know, stronger images if you will of an adult nature.

- In the back, you see the sleeping Mexicans going from cloud to cloud Nintendo style while doing absolutely nothing.

So the idea is when we first started thinking about sloth, Mexican workers have the longest hours in the world and today's world, they're cutting themselves to four days a week, I think.

So it's kind of ironic because here is the north priding itself with a work ethic.

So we decided for this exhibition, we were going to argue completely against the myths of the work ethic, and decided that sloth is what could save the world, because the work ethic is completely tied to this license to be consumerist.

So maybe we just need to be lazier.

- And it's the idea that without having a growth in GDP, then we're not, you know, then it becomes a stagnant economy and that's a negative.

And we need to get used to the idea of not necessarily requiring growth to be happy or consuming to be happy.

Next slide.

Next.

So we decided to also make this piece of a pancho.

If you can click once more.

The pancho is on a Roomba.

So we love the idea that he's lazy and he's sleeping, but he's still sweeping, you know?

So the idea of the lazy Mexican and yet they're the hardest working, you know?

All of this is happening.

So that pancho cost $8, it cost the museum $300 to ship it there, and then it broke so we stuck that image of a Danish fisherman on the back done in needle point.

And so you could see the Danes reacting to this.

Next.

- So we did two large lenticulars for the exhibition.

This one is titled Noon Day Devil.

It's a good six feet high.

- [Einar] And the actual image is next.

You'll see how it moves.

That's the movement you would experience moving in front of it.

So it's two images and there's depth.

So that's why you see both things happening at once.

Lots of stuff going on.

Next.

- And I think the following year or two years later, we were invited to Holland again to participate in a group, a residency called Glass Cities that invited glass artists from various European cities plus us.

So we're not from Europe, so we faked it pretty good.

Next.

- Then the show went to Bavaria, little small museum in Frauenau, Bavaria.

This is one of the wallpaper pieces we made for them that has everything from Bosch to Papel Picado up above of the Belgian revolution.

And then this sort of like melange of stuffed animals.

And we're using more and more of these wallpaper pieces in our work.

Next.

- So there's that piece.

This last piece was about how revolution is also a consumerist item.

- Right, and this is another wall we had at the same museum, and this includes the same pieces, but it keeps growing.

The thing about our European tour is that when we go, we usually make a piece or two in each venue.

So it's been growing as it goes, and there's pieces that were manufactured in Denmark or we made it in Holland or we made.

And we now are starting to title the works that way.

Next.

- And then we were invited by the city of Lille, France to produce an installation and to bring some of our work for a festival that was just called El Dorado.

So we took the whole idea of El Dorado and we decided to make the decadent table of the rich.

And then again, a play on consumerism.

We bought cheap wine and poured it out and let it sort of fester.

So it felt like the party was yesterday.

And we love the idea that you're like both disgusted by this over consumption, but also sad that you weren't invited.

You know, that kind of.

Next, you can see in the background we have wallpaper pieces, some of the ones that you've seen in other images.

This is two ends at the table.

So it's very baro, very elaborate, again, layering of imagery.

Next.

And the rest of the gallery has pieces that we also, they allowed us to put pieces in pedestals.

So we had other wall pieces.

You could see the table that we just showed you is on the end there.

Next.

- And then the following year we went to Poland where we put an installation.

The big wallpaper in the back is sort of like a swirl wind of all the wars that Poland has unfortunately suffered.

So it became kind of like a maelstrom in the center of so many wars between Germany and the USSR.

- And the next slide, please.

In the middle of it, we had just read up the story about Vodinof, which is this character that comes out of a lake and may kill you or save you depending on.

And we latched onto this Vodinof character from the Slavic, you know, history as a kind of Lorax telling us that we're ruining nature.

We need to come back to nature.

We also read up on the Northern crusades and how people that lived in harmony in the forest were taken out and forced to live in villages.

Really interesting stuff if you get a chance.

So this is our little Lorax or Vodinof enough.

Next.

- And this is the same gallery looking the other way, some of the same pieces that we had in other shows.

Next.

- [Einar] Starting to use wallpaper a little more freely.

Next.

- [Jamex] And in the same exhibition we did another edition of the table of decadence.

- Next.

And this is the show that Carlos was talking about in the Cheech called Collidoscope.

Really again, the word play is evident there.

I mean, to use the word collide in terms of kaleidoscope I think was very reverent to our use of images.

In fact, reverence is a good one.

We were asked about our irreverence and to which we would say that you cannot have irreverence without having reverence.

It's built in.

So this show basically started with what used to be the Smithsonian Latino Center that used to be an organ of the Smithsonian that was only a kind of advisory.

Of course when they invited us to show five, six years ago, they didn't have a museum.

We don't yet have that museum.

About three years ago, they finally got approved by Congress to be the National Museum of the American Latino.

Probably 10 years of fundraising, maybe 12, and we'll have a beautiful museum in DC that can represent.

So having the first show without having a venue, they started to look to LA, and a good friend, Cheech Marin, that collects, has a very large collection of Chicano Mexican American art and said, "Why don't you guys open this exhibition there?"

And that's what this is.

Next.

- So here are some use of the brand new museum, the Cheech Museum in Riverside.

These are some lenticulars, some of our pedestal pieces.

Next.

- And this is a kinetic piece that we initially made at Grand Arts in the Kansas City.

It has two wheels going at two different rates.

The front wheel has human hearts that dip in a blood like substance that fills the canoe below.

So they're dripping as they go around.

It's about one revolution per minute.

It's about 10 feet tall, so it's a pretty large wheel.

And there's another wheel in the back that also turns at three rpm.

So there's a lot of ruckus over the turning and the machine, and the chains, and so on.

And that's just a canoe but instead of using it on the water, we filled it up with red colored water.

Next.

- [Jamex] Another view of the museum, and here we have another version of the Olmec head and this case as a lunar lander.

- [Einar] It's called colonial atmosphere.

We wanted to talk a little bit of like, it sounds like they're trying to sell you a hotel in Mexico or something with a very colonial atmosphere.

Next.

- [Jamex] Map of Mexico made with guts called El Fix.

- El fix.

Next.

And another installation in this show that is the exporting democracy.

So there's all these butterfly crucifixes coming out of the center of the United States and flying into the next room where they turn into Jesus Christ jet fighters.

This was made originally this piece for the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and it was during the Iraq war and we are kind of tongue in cheek playing with how you can't export democracy.

Democracy is something you have to culturally sort of embrace and it takes, you know, takes a while to have any country turn to a democracy.

And I've talking a little bit about having some humility about, you know, the road to hell being paved with very good intentions.

Next.

- [Jamex] Another view of the same museum.

- [Einar] It's like four galleries.

Next.

- [Jamex] And that's the Soy Beaner installation we showed you earlier.

- And next.

So we made a permanent installation for the Cheech.

This is a commission that we were talking to the architects from the beginning.

It's a 25 feet tall lenticular about 13 feet wide.

It's Coatlicue or the sort of mother goddess of the Aztecs.

We turned her into a kind of a Mother Earth made out of flora and fauna in one version.

And as you move sideways, she sort of develops into a transformer made out of low rider cars parts.

And so it's the idea is a little bit of the Mother Nature bringing it, trying to bring us back to nature.

And then the low rider is sort of like, we're gonna need science to get us out of this mess because I mean, we don't wanna get preachy.

We flew here.

It's not like we don't have a carbon footprint.

But we, you know, we're a juggernaut.

How are we stopping this thing?

We might need some science.

So there she is trying to guide the way.

We called her a Gaiaclicue Next, it's another version with people.

- I mentioned earlier how we after school, we eventually gave ourselves permission to become the baroque artists that we are now.

We were also part of an exhibition in San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art called Ultra Baroque.

And their premise was that in Latin America, the Spanish came in their high baroque while the Mesoamerican Indians were actually quite baroque themselves.

So Latin America was a baroque times two.

That's why it's ultra baroque, and it has not come out of that in some ways.

And that show completely fit to a tee to how we feel and how we produce.

- Next.

So this is the same piece from above and the other side of the show when you go see it.

So hopefully you'll get a chance to see it out in Riverside.

If not, it's gonna come to other museums.

Hopefully one not too far from here.

Let's see, we're still deciding the last ones.

Next.

- So three weeks ago we returned from Portugal where we installed this exhibition called Postais Colonias.

The name is in reference to the fact that this is the eighth or ninth edition in Europe.

So we're telling ourselves that we're called... What you said?

- Yeah, we're retro colonizing Europe with our work.

So here we are finally in Portugal.

There's images of what's working at the university.

We have a residency there.

Next.

On the way up, we use the same panchos, but this time they're sort of leading you up to the gallery upstairs, rolling with you upstairs.

And here we have sort of the classics, that's Beethoven and other composers and we see them as like the fruit of the classics that we're picking.

Next.

- [Jamex] So that's a piece that we made there in Lisbon.

And we finished there in Marina Grande.

Again, the fly boy that we showed you earlier, but this one is a Mosca Ecclesiastica, so it's an ecclesiastic fly.

- Next.

And the installation of the Vodinof turned different than this one.

It went pastel.

And so here we have it just a sort of lighter, but on the end on the edge of the sphere, there's little endings that look like a retrovirus.

So there's a little corona going on in here.

The little, you know, lurking in the background as we are still wearing masks Next.

- And our last version of the table of decadence in Portugal which became even more disorderly, and to my taste my favorite.

- So in this next slide, the next one, we're gonna finish, but I think we have to take questions from all y'all, which there's microphones up here.

And thank you so much.

- Thank you.

(audience applauding) (audience murmuring) Anybody can... We can take questions while we have the mass exodus.

- Right here, Einar.

Right here.

- I actually have a personal question for both of you.

How'd you guys give yourselves permission to go that extra mile when it comes to works?

Because as an artist myself, I have always struggled trying to go that extra mile when it comes to actively creating my works.

- Do you know it's a good question because art education is problematic by definition.

You as an artist eventually have to give yourself complete permission, but in the meantime you have to go along with assignments.

And of course art educators have their angle, and they're gonna give you their angle and that is not necessarily your angle.

- [Questioner] This is true.

This is true 'cause... Now it works.

This is true as well because I come from a background where art itself has been very stereotyped, and I was taught to at least not look at art school the way I ended up going about it in the first place.

I was lucky to actually figure that out for myself.

That going anywhere else would probably be denying myself something that I know for a fact is what I want to do.

It's sort of like a submission to cynicism when you know for a fact that you can inject yourself into something that, pardon me, into something that can be created.

- Yeah, I think you have a very good point.

I mean, what drives you to continue making?

Again, like I said earlier, in a world full of things, why do we need more?

Well, because you need to have the voice to say it.

You need to believe me, a lot of people stop making art even with degrees, even with advanced degrees or if they do anything, it's art related.

So to continue to have a voice is a really, really difficult position to have.

And it is even tougher if you don't have people that you love and trust to give you the feedback that you require.

So I think that that's a big part of it.

Believing in what you do is that's when you also have to show your work and get the support from whether it's colleagues or faculty, but you need that support because, you know, good art is always on the edge of the absurd.

You're always on the edge of falling, going too far and not in the right way.

And you have to keep pushing that, and in a weird way, you know, we're lucky in that we are each other's sounding board.

And we might call each other on stuff, and so I don't know if that answers it.

- It does actually, and I guess the final point in that is when an artist isn't able to express themselves, when an artist isn't able to talk, they will often want to scream.

- Right, exactly.

And we have to have faith somehow.

It's a tough one.

- I'm struck by the kinetic or dynamic nature of your installations.

And as you're doing the traveling exhibitions through Europe, you're adding to each.

It sounds like every exhibition has some new things, and I'm struck by that table.

Do you change that at every exhibition?

So you disassemble it, move it, and then you recreate it so it's never the same?

- It's a bunch of parts, but it's not the table itself.

They usually, the museum borrows a table from- - [Questioner 2] Right, that's what I'm saying is the arrangement on the table.

- But even that will vary greatly.

Last one had a much bigger table so this one we constricted it, but we needed more than the table so we added chairs.

So every one is slightly different, and we realized that adding chairs that had enough aesthetic quality for this sort of table of the rich.

The tables themselves, I mean, the chairs themselves became a little pedestal and we put pieces on them and that became another way of... Because chairs of course are about a human engagement by sitting down so they became objects that had that sort of a human scale presence to them that wasn't on top of the pedestal, but it was like sitting, waiting for you like a small child or a dog or something.

And that had that quality of presence that way.

- So each one is a unique temporary installation that will never be duplicated.

The idea of it is continuous.

- Right, so for instance, two pieces that were in the last version, we decided to just finish them as pieces and they were displayed as pedestal pieces in this show because they just didn't have the table for it.

So we took the opportunity to just finish them as works.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- So early on in the lecture, you mentioned how there's a choice where you can either have the medium speak for you or you can push your message through the medium.

And considering like the baroque, the maximalism, and color and just like everything that you have going on in your works, how do you guys guys self-edit when you're coming up with these pieces and you're looking through old stuff and deciding when to create or obtain new items?

- That's a good question too because we struggle with that.

Of course, when we're putting together a mixed media piece, we always overdo it.

So there's always a moment where, you know, you have to retreat and you have to think about the sign, and eloquence, and visual pacing, all those things in order for the piece to stand by itself.

- But there there is a over... Like my brother says, it's almost like we kind of overdo it, but in our communication and without somebody to work with, you have to have this on your own.

For us it's additive and then subtractive, and we are using the old tropes of art school that are have to do with with color and what your eyes doing, or what does your eye go, which have to do with just good design or basic design.

It may look like mayhem but there's order in the mayhem.

- [Questioner 3] Right, thank you.

- [Questioner 4] Hola.

(questioner speaks foreign language) I'll just switch to English.

So in like your art, I see that you are Mexican, like I see the Mexican culture, but I feel like for a lot of us or like myself, it's easier to like just make Mexican art rather than it coming from like a Mexican artist.

So like, how do you I guess avoid that of like making art inspired by our culture rather than like just making Mexican art?

- Another great question and it is a really difficult one, and I'm gonna launch in a little bit into appropriation here.

Because after all, the art, the history of art is the history of appropriation.

Everything comes from somewhere else, and everything is a product, and is a rendition and is homage, really a ton of homage.

So I think that it's important not to make art that becomes a parody of things.

And I think that's a really tough one because when the culture as rich as the Mexican culture that is so visually rich, it is a battle to make things your own because it's already there.

It's already wonderful, colorful, and imbued and all these things.

So you have to rise your voice as to rise through that.

In other words, you have to make it your own.

So when you grab something that is recognized, it can't be that you're making a version of it.

It has to be people have to be able to say that's eventually, oh that's yours.

That's got your stamp, that's got your signature, it's got your aesthetic, it's got your content.

Something has to transcend that.

And there is no formula for this stuff, but what I can say is that that's what you strive for.

So there's nothing wrong with relying with richness of anywhere you come from because the problem with trying to be universal is that you lose identity.

If you try to be liked by everybody, you actually forget who you are because everybody's gonna like it.

That's just an aesthetic decision of making something pretty.

You still need to retain the fact that you come from somewhere and your work has that information of you and where you come from in some way that can be so personal that is only self-referential and maybe not interesting to other people.

And so there's always a balance of trying to be, you know, who you are and your regionalism and trying to be universal, and there's something there in between that we have to do.

And that's your job is to figure out what that means to you because you need to trace that path, and you've got a lot there.

We just have to put your name on it.

- You mentioned that it's Mexican, but for us it's so, so American because we also grew up in the US.

So that experience of seeing our home country from the lens of outside is also important for the way we work.

So it's also liberating in some ways.

- Yeah, it's insider outsiders.

We could see Mexico from the outside, or we could see the US from the outside and I think that that's the beautiful thing about having more than one culture.

It's not just having two languages, which is of course that's wonderful as well, but it's that you understand both, and I know a lot of the misunderstandings that there is between the two cultures 'cause I live them.

And part of our work in some way as cultural ambassadors is to bridge that a little bit.

Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Hi, I'm curious about like what part of your art education you personally like prioritized or like reflecting on back and like art, and what you studied in college or after and your graduate studies.

Like, what aspects felt most rewarding in the opportunities that you took?

- You know, after having said the earlier comment about how art education is by definition problematic, I also wanna say that art education is actually hugely useful as long as you're strong to stand your ground in the sense that you can get so many tools and skills that you can use all your life.

You just have to have your own personal criteria to figure it out what you take and what you don't take.

And we also I think talked earlier how we had mentors in our careers, and those were just as meaningful as our art career, as our art education.

- And I could add to that, maybe that art school is a great place to learn what you don't wanna do.

Meaning that you're gonna learn this technique.

Oh no, I love printmaking but I don't love to print make.

So then you're like, you're like trying to figure out what your path is and that's a really valuable tool because you're gonna be exposed to so many possibilities that you're going to ferret out what speaks to you.

And it's a very valuable tool no matter how fraught with the problematics of the idea of teaching art are because of course they are.

How do you teach that it's your own path, it's your own thing?

And that's why a good teacher's amazing and there's a lot of teachers that maybe don't speak to you because of their own frustrations or other things, and it's not the easiest path but it's a rewarding one.

- [Questioner 5] Thank you.

- Hi, so I actually am from San Diego.

It was really, really weird to have someone like all the way out here explaining like national city and the border 'cause I just grew up with that type of stuff and I've even worked down there before.

But I was wondering if there's anything else around town in San Diego that I can like hunt down when I go back for Christmas.

Do you guys have more public art pieces?

- We do, the main public library in San Diego downtown has some lenticular work in the elevator.

Look for that.

We have work in front of the convention center with our first project, and in the airport we have some work.

So there's plenty in San Diego.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Hello.

When looking at your lenticular work, it captures like I don't know, maximalism in certain aspects.

I think it's really interesting.

How do you, I was curious on like what the process is like to choose what images you go with?

And I guess more than that it's like you're reading a message or whatever you have like these large scale pieces like we were looking at the museum one earlier today.

Like that paid homage to I think you said like goddess or something like that.

I couldn't hear all the way, hearing's kind of bad, but I was curious in understanding like when you approach like these large or like, you know, these large feats in a sense when it comes to art, how do you choose these images?

Because oftentimes I saw that you had some that coincide or like were similar and through editing and things like that, and then you had ones that are completely different.

- So it's essentially a digital collage, and Einar in his computer keeps an extensive library of photos we've been taking all over.

And whenever we have a project, we also do research and harvest from the internet to rather freely.

- But a good way to think about it 'cause the hardest thing is to populate the canvas.

The hard thing is the architecture to start, meaning that what's the structure?

Am I going bilateral, am I breaking the bilateral?

Am I looking at something that is more architecturally based?

Or because even of course outdoors is architectural in a different way in the sense that you're creating planes and you're creating distance and foreground background, all of these things.

So in a strange way it's still even though I'm using kind of a three dimensional analogy, it is that way because we need to be able.

Otherwise, you just have stuff and you need to create like depths and things in the back, especially since depth is part of what I'm playing with.

When we compose these things, I'm kind of trying to figure out how can I have windows so that it's more interesting to see the foreground background, main characters, and in a strange way it's like saying, I'm making a stage, I'm making the surroundings of it, I'm putting some characters in the foreground, I'm getting these little guys back here.

Maybe there's some, you know, it's a construction of a scene is a good way to look at it.

So that might be the best way I could describe it.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

Yes.

- Hi.

(questioner speaks foreign language) My question, I was thinking also along the lines of like appropriation and all those sorts of things.

And I'm wondering in terms of your purpose with your art, how does that like play into that in terms of like your personal art, and then how that, you know, like differentiates with when you make public art, and I guess just like the iconography that you use and how does that change also because you're going like international and how that might be perceived in different places?

- Yeah, in public art, like we said earlier, it's hugely limiting.

We can't put the sexuality and the political statements that we love to put in our studio work.

Obviously because it has to pass committee.

So like I said earlier, we asked ourselves, we can't do that, but what can we do?

And there's always a little bit of an angle to get away with something for public art.

And I think if I understand your question right, the personal view versus the universal, right?

- [Questioner 6] Mm-hmm, and just kind of like how does your identity, like how do you choose when your identity comes out into your art?

- Sometimes that has more to do with the venue.

So just like one of the previous questions said that there's shows in San Diego.

I mean, if you are in near the border, you know (speaks foreign language) you know the iconography and it's all kind of more ingrained and the further away we get from that, we need to be more aware that less people know about it.

So that's a good way to look at it.

It's in some ways it's not so much that I'm changing what I do, but I have to sort of didactically think about how it could be perceived and therefore maybe be more active in helping the education of an understanding of work to bring people with me.

Whereas somewhere else they might, I mean, I'm preaching to the choir if I start talking about border things on the border.

There, I might leave that down.

So it's not just what we choose to use in our work, but it's also the way that you choose to talk about it, or sort of present it.

- When something becomes very, very personal in your personal experience, you really have to ask yourself why should anybody care?

You have to turn the tables around and go, okay, maybe that's esoteric and it's so personal that they're not gonna get it.

And you do have to provide an angle, an entrance for people to access to make up their own minds about what they see, which goes into the whole realm of artist therapy.

You could say that all for artists, it is therapy to make their art 'cause you're getting it out and you need to get it out of you and so on.

But you do have to wonder how that your message becomes a relevant thing to convey.

And again, like we talked earlier about how to think about as many possible readings is kind of your job, your responsibility.

Especially when issues appropriation, you need to be stand, sometimes you need to stand corrected.

You may have appropriated something wrong and if somebody tells you this is way outta line, find out if it was and if you need to retract, you'd certainly need to step back and say, oh, you know, that was not right.

I will walk away from that and say that I did not know that, I did my research, I didn't do enough, whatever.

On the other hand, if you try so hard to censor yourself, you'll never do anything.

It's kind of like something else I wanted to mention.

It's kinda like art magazines.

If you just read art magazines all day long, your artwork's gonna start looking like that.

It's subconscious.

You will slowly be a person of your times, which is perhaps important in some ways, but it's also damaging perhaps in that how do you become an individual when you're so being affected by the aesthetics of what art looks like in your time.

And what we recommend is yes some, but not be consumed by it because it'll be part of your aesthetic repertoire overwhelmingly.

So there's always a balance and everybody makes their own different formulas when it comes to this balance.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

(questioner speaks foreign language) (questioner laughs) Muchas gracias, thank you so much for being here with us.

(questioner speaks foreign language) I have a question about the use of humor.

In your art you talk about like (speaks foreign language), but I'm wondering could you talk more about those intersections of using humor and play, and I love the way that you use play the way you talk about play, but what does that mean to you in your own creative processes?

- Yes, humor has always been part of our lives.

We blame our mom for her funny puns that we grew up with, but humor is a way of coping with life, right?

Part of our what we like to want to say in our artwork is to reflect on the human condition.

And the human condition is harsh in so many ways.

We live and then we don't.

And if we don't have humor, how do you cope?

You know, it's part of it.

And humor's also an important hook in order to reel in people to let their guard down, in order to maybe approach a harsher subject.

And I think also Mexico, to be fair, has a very dark humor.

People joke about stuff in a way that it sort of raises eyebrows in the society in the United States.

And I think that there's reasons for it because of course if you have a tougher life, you're more familiar with death.

Maybe that's part of the whole day of the dead talk that we need to have that's not just Coco, but it's maybe also the fact that, you know, you have a little outside of town, you have a little cemetery that looks like a little town.

So it's a necropolis, it's where you go see your grandmother and it's where you've always know you're gonna end up.

That's your town too.

- So we have time for two more questions, but you had another question about Chicano, did you?

(questioner speaks foreign language) Right, the Mexican American experience and how that comes through.

- Yes, that is an interesting question because we just opened a exhibition at the Chicano museum.

So what is Chicano to us is, I guess we are with Cheech, who has a very pan Chicano view of it because in some sense we were born in Mexico and we still live in Mexico.

So another friend, a curator Selene Preciado likes to say, "The way I answer that, I say I am a hundred percent Mexican, a hundred percent American, a hundred percent Chicano.

So that's a way to not say, well I'm less here or less there, you know?

I think when you're an immigrant, you lose step on a moment of thinking of yourself as a neither nor, which is very dehumanizing.

And then you make the other step and you go, actually no, actually I am so lucky because I have both and why not take both, you know?

Thank you.

- Gracias.

- Gracias.

- Hi.

So you talked about being a retro colonizer and also how your art is on the edge of absurdity, I guess.

And it seems like a lot of what you're trying to convey is being like anti-consumer.

So how do you approach that problem within your process knowing that you're connecting with people mainly visually, but you still want to encourage them to like even think about changing their habits and behaviors for the greater good?

- It's a great question.

I think that for us, we're careful not proselytizing.

Who are we to fly out here using an airplane, using a car, renting a car, using cell phones to say that you shouldn't do that?

We're not preaching.

We really believe art is not a good platform for preaching because art should be about opening ideas as opposed to seeing things my way.

So why we are here is not to talk about the way you should think like us, but these are things that confront us and they bother us, and they should perhaps we're just saying, shouldn't these things bother us?

Art is a way of talking about things in a vicarious manner.

You can make art about murder without murdering somebody, which is fabulous for instance.

It's like a weird kind of a vicarious experience.

I'm sorry I used a strong example, but that's what art can do.

It can do everything the best, beautiful, harsh, ugly, it's all there and it should be 'cause I think art is a realm for opening these conversations.

So I think that when we talk about that, we try to be careful not to sound like we have answers 'cause it's not about answers for us.

It's about the dialogue that can possibly happen.

Art isn't the best soapbox for political or social change, but it is part of social and political change.

It isn't the best forum for it, and we actually tell students that be careful.

Don't think that you're gonna again proselytize through this, through your medium.

'Cause then first of all, you're preaching to the choir already.

I mean, the people you see in museums or art galleries are, you know, kind of the same gene pool.

And so it's tough that way, but you also have to be hopeful and feel and hope that you're part of a greater dialogue that is doing good.

'Cause after all the reason that we like humor and we get up in the morning, we work and we have, it's because we are optimists.

You know, I mean, you have to be an optimist.

I mean, winter's coming.

- I think us as people, we have the great weight of obligations.

All of us deal with the environment and the world.

But us as artists, we have none.

And I think it's very important to say that because that's where good art comes from.

Because if you burden art with changing the world, there is better forms for, like Einar was saying.

I think when art is completely free of obligation then, then you can't help but flow what you have inside you, which is riddled with all this stuff.

So your preoccupations, your anger and your delight is so gonna come out in the art.

But essentially when you burden with an obligation to begin with, then you're not free.

You know, it's a dichotomy of practice.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- And last question please.

- [Participant] No, you been standing.

- Hi, sorry to be the last one.

I wanted to ask two quick things.

One is just if you could talk a little bit about scale when you're working on these big scale ones and the tiny ones, what changes for you?

What excites you or doesn't about both?

And the second is you use the presence of a lot of religious imagery and iconography, which you're also parodying and playing with.

And what has been the continued presence of that in your work even now and how you respond to it?

- That's a good question.

Scale is a tricky one.

And even if our experience with public art still surprises us and we do the models, we do the maquettes with all the stuff to try to predict and experience, but honestly, you know, it's a tough one.

It still surprises us.

- Things change a lot with scale.

So like with all the predictability, there's still once again it's sort of liberating to go back and into little pieces because you're like, okay, this is, you know, this is, you can hug it or whatever.

It's like this human thing.

But the funny thing about scale is that if you do measurements, 'cause you have to measure, it's important with scale, don't mess around.

Measure twice, cut once.

That's it.

You still if every...

I mean, if you did measure well, it'll come out, it'll be big.

But just remember that we're still this big.

So if something's big, you're not gonna see it from here, you're gonna see it.

So those things are important to keep in mind when you start getting monumental is the fact that our scale just becomes it's a human scale issue.

- Second question about religious.

- Yes, just a lot of your imagery and iconography is you're using and you're playing with and spoofing a lot of religious iconography.

- We obviously grew up Catholic.

We're not Catholic, we're not religious at all anymore, but the artistic tradition of the Catholics is tremendous.

So for us to draw from it is absolutely natural.

We spent so many hours completely bored in churches as kids.

But all the richness you can see with the effect that it had on us.

- And all the work in Europe for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years was commissioned artworks about all of these stories.

You know, for instance, the patron that has a painting made either has his wife or his lover as the Virgin Mary and then the little baby turns up looking like him, which is we love that we're gonna make a piece just with these babies that look like, you know, rich, old, you know, chubby guys.

So we think there's...

Anyway, I think we have to end it.

The red light's been on for a while.

Thank you so much.

- Thank you so much.

- Cheers.

- Thank you.