Tulsa

Low-Brow and High-Brow Come Together At Philbrook’s New Show

by Z.B. Reeves | Feb 9, 2024 3:17 pm

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Posted to: Visual Art

Collidoscope: de la Torre Brothers Retro-Perspective
Philbrook Museum of Art
Tulsa
Through April 28 

Remember lenticular? It’s that style of art with a glossy, shifting surface, where the image changes depending on your vantage point. In popular children’s images, an eye winks or a lion’s mouth opens. In Philbrook’s new show, ​“Collidoscope: de la Torre Brothers Retro-Perspective,” the images are a little weirder. 

This show brings together many of the collected works of Einar and Jamex de la Torre, two brothers born in Guadalajara into a family of artists that brought them up on both sides of the San Diego/Tijuana border. The brothers work primarily in glass and lenticular: odd mediums for odd images. To be annoyingly dualistic, the iconography stems from both Christian/white/“American” sources and Mesoamerican/Aztec/contemporary Mexican sources. 

So much of the work in the exhibit is about that in-between space: the border, the shifting identities (Mexican? American? Sure, the show says), the confluence between old and new. Perhaps the most striking is La Reconquista (inspired and fashioned after Dutch painter Hans Memling’s The Last Judgment of 1473), in which figures like Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, along with many celebrities and those generally considered ​“white,” share the entranceway to Heaven — complete with Bank of America logo. In the middle, Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who ravaged the Aztec civilization, presides over the judgment, while the indigenous people of Mesoamerica (in their traditional masks) are shown on the right, cast into hell. 

The brothers’ glass work is no less surreal and striking, invoking awe as well as a certain disgust. There’s something uncanny and horrifying about an anatomically-accurate heart with lips, tongue, and teeth, or a baby covered in tattoos wearing a Dia de los Muertos mask, sitting atop a tiny four-poster bed. The most intimidating piece greets the visitor at the entrance. Oxymodern (Aztec Calendar) is a massive circular panel with a plurality of images: demons playing dominos, Tecate, cigarettes made of rebar, more anatomic hearts, semen entering the piece from four sides. 

The works reveal a highly image-literate and flexible pair of artists who traffic in ideas both low- and high-brow, repelling the eye as much as inviting and enticing it, challenging world-views that they themselves cannot quite cast off. Do I dare get closer to the images of unpackaged meat heading towards the Mexico-US border (seemingly a metaphor for our current migrant crisis)? Dare I see myself as the de la Torre brothers’ work might see me, a privileged white American who drinks filtered water while children die of thirst? The work challenges me to confront my particular relationship to that border, that nexus of power and domination. 

To be sure, it’s not all funny, though much of it is. The brothers encourage the viewer not so much to laugh it off as to laugh through it, examining how and why our notions of cultural supremacy come about, how they might be challenged, and how absolutely ridiculous they might all be.

Next for Z. B. Reeves: Labrys at Mercury Lounge, Feb. 10

Tags: mexican-american , glass , lenticular