Efrain Torres is an artist and producer who draws influence from popular & queer culture, as well as 80's & 90's aesthetics. Torres works with a vast range of media fusing audio, drawing, installation, graphic design, painting, performance, photography, printmaking, and video.
Torres' current work explores and celebrates identity performance, queer world-making, and intrapersonal inquiry in response to growing up Catholic as a Queer Mexican-American male. His work encourages the practice of identifying with one's desired role and dis-identifying from those roles society tells one to be while questioning social constructs. Torres stretches, struggles, and blends the relationship of femininity and masculinity, both in a sexual and non-sexual fashion, while deconstructing gender norms of Mexican-American culture, a culture that is deeply committed to the Catholic church and has stern traditions when it attains to gender roles. Torres' work creates secure atmospheres in the hope of escaping social judgment, as well as self-judgment.
Torres received his Bachelor of Arts in Studio Arts with an emphasis in painting from California State University in San Bernardino, California, and received a Master of Fine Arts in the Art Program at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. He has exhibited his work nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Torres has previously shown at Art Share LA (Los Angeles, CA), The Walking Gallery (Pomona, CA), Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art (San Bernardino, CA), Shoshana Wayne Gallery (Santa Monica, CA), and Chaffey College Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art (Rancho Cucamonga, CA). Torres was a resident artist at PermaDirty Project Space from 2011 to 2013, where he curated the group exhibition, Intertwine Originals (2013). From 2010-2011, Efrain Torres was a resident artist at Lifework Gallery and Studio in Palm Springs, California. Torres served as Co-Director of The Walking Gallery, an alternative gallery in Pomona, California, from 2010-2013. Torres' works have featured in articles for Coyote Chronicle and Inland Empire Weekly plus published in The Chaffey Review, Volume IV. Torres' works are part of the Robert Summer Queer Collection at Cerritos College, and the California Institute of the Arts Archives. Efrain Torres works and resides in the Greater Los Angeles area in California.