Park Wherever

Christopher Suarez

Opening Reception: November 2nd, 2024

3415 Verdugo Rd. LA CA 90065

Within Park Wherever, Los Angeles-based artist Christopher Suarez’ first solo exhibition with GGLA, an unassuming concrete patio adjoining the physical GGLA gallery space to La Casita turned auxiliary gallery next door, becomes a site for reflection and rumination. Thinking of the driveway as a place where culture is produced, passed down and rejected, Suarez examines the impact of this space on the artist’s own identity, as well as the ways in which this overlooked space is enmeshed within the social and cultural fabric of LA. For Suarez and his family, the driveway was a site for celebrating birthdays, or watching sports, or even a space for reflection and praying the rosary. Through carefully rendered ceramics that compose a larger and deeply layered installation, Suarez pays homage to the driveway and all of the histories and potential that emanate from this humble cement slab. 

An often used adage passed on by ceramic teachers is that “clay has memory”, quite literally, the material will often retain and replicate the movements and ways in which it was handled. Yet metaphorically clay also serves as a ripe conduit for recollection, compacting and stretching both time and place. Within Park Wherever, clay takes shape in a litany of ways, constructing boxy tvs that recall the heavy monitors of the 80s and 90s. Detailed coaxial inputs, embossed branding and dimpled speakers are complimented by carefully glazed scenes captured on the screen, as if frozen in time. Affectionately rendered in painterly underglaze, these critical moments hold a deeper significance for Suarez and his family. These scenes from basketball games and soccer matches from the early 2000s speak not only to that particular game, but the surrounding social atmosphere. What was on the barbeque? Who was there? What did we talk about at school the next day? From Kobe sinking a freethrow to win the Lakers 5th championship in 2010, or Cuauhtémoc Blanco performing one of his iconic celebrations after a goal for Club América, like portals, these moments have a way of transporting us back to a deeply specific time and place.  

In addition to the televisions, Suarez has created flattened car silhouettes that resemble the rudimentary toys you’d find in a toddler’s room, with a wide variety of automobiles representing the hustle and bustle of a busy city–paths crossing as workers brave their commutes home, all in hopes of getting home in time for dinner. Additionally, Suarez has created bridges and miniature residential towers from the same deep red terracotta stoneware, carefully crafting sloped roofs, compact balconies, and outlines of windows that punctuate flat facades. The buildings act as domestic spaces, as containers for communities and all of the people that hope to celebrate in adjoining driveways. Furthering the sense of architecture and materiality, Suarez has employed steel rebar pedestals consisting of bent archway forms that mirror the curvatures in the ceramic buildings, while speaking to the actual stabilizing structure that underlies the very driveway upon which this exhibition stands.