Por El Río; Community Building Day #2

Work alongside the artists of Por El Río to co-build complementary structures that extend the installation.This two-part workshop series offers an opportunity to learn about the various processes, techniques, and themes of the project and contribute to a public artwork. Due to limited capacity, RSVPs are required.

Saturday, December 14, 2024
1:00-4:00 PM
Taylor Yard Bridge

For our second Community Building Day, artists Christopher Suarez and timo fahler invite you to learn the material histories and processes that informed Por El Rio, with a focus on the 51-mile Los Angeles River channel. Both artists spent time along the river to collect and assemble the debris that accumulated there, including sun-baked clothes, plant matter, and paper ephemera—items that prompted interpretations of their potential origins and points of contact. Responding to the brutal presence of concrete that dominates and borderizes our city's landscape, Suarez and fahler sought what remains or gets left behind, embedding these traces in their works as an attempt to preserve personal and communal histories as an archival document. 

Attendees will first select and collect items found along the riverbanks, led by Suarez, mirroring his artistic process in creating his bench as part of the installation. Then, fahler will share how he made the base of his sculpture, eso es, using a mixture of limestone and gypsum in place of concrete in a casting process activated in the river channel, where the chemicals, debris, and alluvium unify. Attendees will collectively cast frames with their found materials, which will ornament the fenced portion of eso es and remain on view until the end of the exhibition. 

Light refreshments and protective equipment will be provided.

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 included 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.

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.

ARRIVAL
The workshop will be held on the riverbanks at the north side of the Orange Bridge in Glassell Park. Detailed arrival instructions will be emailed to participants before the event. 

SUPPORT
Por El Río was commissioned by Clockshop and supported through our long-standing partnership with California State Parks. The production of this work was generously supported by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the Angeles Art Fund, and ARLA, with additional support from Los Angeles Department of Arts and Culture and Clockshop’s generous community of supporters.