Artist Statement

Color, humor, texture, and my quixotic attempt at understanding the frantic, self important culture I find myself in are the components of my art. Working in a wide variety of media including assemblage, painting, sculpture, film, music and installation, my pieces are explorations of materials, techniques and the inherent ironies of life.

I collect and reconstruct the discarded refuse of our throwaway society, abstracting familiar objects into an often expansive scale. These once "needed" or "desired" objects, now cast away, send me on a journey of memory, nostalgia, or visceral reactions which lead me to a dreamscape that I hope others can connect to. For me each piece speaks to a spontaneous and unique experience.

-Esteban Bojorquez

Esteban Bojorquez and his Fabulous Shack

Nothing prepared me for the work Esteban produced for the Shack Show I helped curate at Laguna Art Museum, June, 2010.

Artist Kevin Ancell started it, CR Stecyk weighed in about the same and Museum Director Bolton Colburn sealed it; The decision was made, Esteban was invited to participate.

At the exhibit opening Esteban reminisced, "When I got the call my hands started shaking, I had been waiting 30 years for that call. I hung up, ran to the workshop and sawed, hammered, sanded, applied, reduced, added and basically worked non-stop for over 600 hours creating my shack."

Esteban's shack was for myself, the curator, the surprise entrance to the show. I had no idea what he was going to submit. His shack was one of the largest and most elaborate, a masterpiece of retrospective and futuristic concepts. This structure was composed of seductive mottled surfaces, 13 port holes took you into many secret and visually interesting areas, and a white plastic globe with experimental art films playing on the surface - taken when Esteban was living in a real life art shack during the 1980s in Reseda, California.

The shack's magnetic appeal commanded me to plant myself right in front of it where I remained during the entire opening.

"You do art and you surf, we are family", One of the many wisdom's gleaned from Esteban during the brief course of the show. What I am saying is by witnessing Bojoroquez's art and persona we become part of his insight, his skill and interpretation, his amazing artistic vision and family.

Viva Esteban Borjoquez! - Gregg Escalante

WHAT: Outside: Esteban Bojorquez and Kai Bob Cheng California State University Northridge Art Galleries

HAIKU REVIEW: Kai Bob Cheng And Esteban Bojorquez have both long dedicated their efforts to building stuff, but surfing craftsman Bojorquez has come around relatively recently to the ambitious assemblage aesthetic practiced for decades by Cheng. Bojorquez's approach is expansive and spectacular, physically detailed but narratively straightforward, while Cheng's is more elaborate and hermatic. Cheng tells a story with objects, while while Bojorquez mounts a theater of objects. They both wield a skilled hand and hungrey eye, but they look so good together because they actually practice very different aesthetics.

- Peter Frank - Huffington Post 12/10/2010

Super X Media

Esteban Bojorquez is a man out of time. Equal portions of early Spanish settler, aboriginal Californian, modern Malibu master, surfboard designer, and contemporary artiste comprise his identity. The combinators family were amongst the first expeditions to come to the golden state. Bojorquez challenges his environment with his riding, a well balanced blending of velocity and critical positioning. He lives in his art, creating elaborate tableau vivants, which require years of dedicated work to complete. The art critics refer to his work as being gesamtkunstwerk (all over art), while Bojorquez makes no reference to it at all. He just does it, for no other reason that it's there to be done.

- C. R. Stecyk lll