Opening Reception; Por El Río

Save the date to join us for the opening reception of Por El Río, a Clockshop public art commission by Christopher Suarez with Carlos Agredano, Diana Yesenia Alvarado, and timo fahler. A walk-through by the artists will center on the collaborative making of Por El Río, including mutual reflections on their exploration of materiality in tracing geographical histories.

Saturday, September 28, 2024
3:00-5:00 PM
Los Angeles State Historic Park

Por El Río traces the visual languages and utilities of the channelized Los Angeles River (Paayme Paxaayt) and 710 Freeway parallel at the convergence of land and city. Often working in clay miniatures of built environments central to immigrant communities, Christopher Suarez designs a site for gathering at an interpersonal, human scale. Together, the artists produce a series of functional architectures that investigate personal and civic geographic histories and the traces they leave behind. 

The artists, each with roots along the north-south corridor that terminates at Long Beach, consider the uneven and residual racial and ecological harms caused by the expansions of modern transit infrastructure. The channelized river, a flood control project built to direct inflow into the ocean, and the 710, a major throughline designed for regional connection, both catalyze dislocations of people and wildlife. Por El Río mines these sites of severance to suggest how new social ecologies might form through conscious reconstruction. 

Through interpreted reproductions of civic infrastructural elements like public benches, traffic barriers, and freeways, the artists’ ‘benches’ span registers of material inquiry and utility—two of which can be sat on, one leaned on, and one laid under. In iterations and variations, collections of found organic objects and sourced industrial materials are compressed, cast, and inscribed upon to improvise the ways people and wildlife adapt interstitial spaces for shade, leisure, and life. The benches are positioned in formal and suggestive configurations, facing one another to invite congregation and staggered to capture singularity. Through community building workshops, the artists will invite the public to cocreate complementary structures. A foil to the physical and psychic boundaries of hostile architecture, Por El Río forges emergent structural conditions for connection in public space.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Christopher Suarez (b. 1994) is an artist born, raised, and based in Long Beach, CA. Foundational to Suarez’s work are examinations of his personal and familial memories of home, the histories of place, and the ways they are lived vis-à-vis built environments. He employs clay and mixed media sculptures to simultaneously celebrate immigrant working-class communities' aesthetic and cultural identities and to reveal their precarious state. Suarez’s work has been exhibited at the Art, Design, and Architecture Museum; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery; Sebastian Gladstone Gallery; and Stanley’s Gallery. Suarez was selected to be in Made in LA 2023: Acts of Living at the Hammer Museum. Christopher Suarez received a BFA in Ceramic Arts from California State University, Long Beach.

Carlos Agredano (b. 1998 Los Angeles, CA) is an artist from Southeast Los Angeles. He uses readymade and process-based artworks to record and reveal environmental racism, such as paintings documenting the cumulative buildup of pollutants and smog on surfaces or found objects such as dust-caked window air conditioners. In his research practice, Agredano interrogates how policies like redlining and private racially restrictive covenants enabled freeway construction and manufactured air pollution disparities in racially diverse, low-income neighborhoods. Agredano has exhibited at Human Resources, François Ghebaly, and SculptureCenter. He holds a BA in History and Literature from Harvard University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. 

Diana Yesenia Alvarado (b. 1992, Los Angeles) explores mythologies, archetypes, and cultural histories through earthen materials. Her work encompasses abstract sculptures, figurative explorations, and animated creations that embody narratives both personal and mystical. Through manipulating form, vibrant colors, and intricate techniques, Alvarado creates works that serve as cultural reflections. Her sculptures have been exhibited at prominent venues such as Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (Los Angeles & New York), Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Rubell Museum (Miami), Veta Galleria (Madrid), and Hammer Museum (Los Angeles).

timo fahler (b. 1978, Tulsa, OK) is a Los Angeles-based artist using steel, glass, plaster, wood, and found objects to construct culturally significant works that celebrate and reconsider multicultural aesthetics in America. His practice is inspired by science fiction, historical texts, and comparative mythology. Through rebar drawings, glass compositions, and plaster replicas of body and earth, he invokes familial relationships to manual labor and presents alternative narratives. His work has been shown at MOCA Tucson, the Kleefield Museum at Cal State Long Beach, the Philbrook Museum of Art, the Torrance Art Museum, Ballroom Marfa, Sebastian Gladstone, 56 Henry, and Ibid Gallery. He received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.