As Mexican-American bi-cultural artists, we are on
the one hand influenced by the morbid humor of Mexican folk art,
the absurd pageantry of Catholicism, and machismo - and on the other
hand, we are equally fascinated by the American culture of excess:
its pornographic materialism, its blow-up doll aesthetic, and most
of all, its lingering puritanism. We see the ability to play insider-outsider
with our status as an asset for us as artists. Considering this,
it seems natural for us to want to work with a certain irreverence,
even though irreverence can potentially lead to alienation and the
feeling of being neither-nor. Instead, we see irreverence as a tool
for reinvention. Reinvention coming from cultural mixes or mestizajes
is what gives the border region its vitality, and produces weird
hybrids that are exactly anti-minimalistic and decandent. These
weird hybrids are expressed in our work by our use of mixed media,
found objects, and other techniques that allow us to weave different
juxtapositions. Our pragmatic attitude towards being bi-cultural
is also in our approach to glass. Hot glass is a seductive medium
that sets up its trap with easy beauty. We wanted to know how to
make hot glass speak more about our disjointed lives than about
its own overbearing beauty. The answer for us was to treat glass
the same way we have treated different aspects of culture - with
qualified irreverence. We choose glass in the first place because
we are attracted to the immediacy of the medium. There is no other
plastic material for sculpture as spontaneous as hot glass.
