MOCA GA / Calendar

2024/2025 Working Artist Project

This round of the MOCA GA Working Artist Project was curated by Apsara DiQuinzio, senior curator of contemporary art at the Nevada Museum of Art

About the Exhibition

Fire, in its perpetual becoming, does not only consume: it also reveals, transforms, and leaves barely legible marks in the sliver of the visible. Traces of an Unseen Fire, Sergio Suárez’s solo exhibition at MOCA GA, is an exercise in speculative archaeology—a cartography of the sacred that seeps through layers of time, matter, and language, where printmaking, ceramics, and cosmological imagery intertwine to question the possible futures buried within the present.

Suárez operates in the porous boundary between the sacred and the corporeal, between ancestral gestures and the contemporary gaze. His prints exist halfway between devotional iconography and astral schematics; they are thresholds to cosmologies sedimented in strata of cosmic memory. Illegible liturgies that remind us all narrative constructions are provisional.

Each crystallized wave and every ceramic fragment is a topography of touch. In the constellations of forms—evoking both funerary archaeological traces and the geometric patterns of a collapsing star—lies a visual syntax that does not distinguish between the metaphysical and the empirical, between clay and pixel: a syncretism that is not reconciliation but a controlled erosion of the boundaries between categories.

At a historical moment when the future appears to us as a horizon in flames, Traces of an Unseen Fire reminds us that fire is not a metaphor but an agent of chemical metamorphosis. It does not purify; it transmutes. And that we must transmute the rubble of history into a narrative that allows us to inhabit chaos without domesticating it—an ontology of the residual that understands the past not as origin but as an active geological layer where time does not only dissolves, it will also solidify the begining of something else, something we may not yet know how to name: traces of another world.

About Sergio Suarez

Sergio Suárez is a Mexican born Atlanta based visual artist and printmaker. His work explores how materiality and semiotics influence notions of the body, metaphysics and various cosmovisions. He is a B.F.A graduate of the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design, Atlanta, GA.

His recent solo exhibitions include Pale Fire Projects, Vancouver B.C.,KDR, Miami FL; Stove Works, Chattanooga, TN; Hawkins Headquarters, Atlanta, GA; THE END Project Space, Atlanta, GA & The Consulate General of Mexico in Atlanta, GA. Suárez has exhibited at group exhibitions at Johnson Lowe, Atlanta, GA; Whitespace Gallery, Atlanta, GA; MOCA GA, Atlanta, GA; and at Pasaquan & the Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus, GA; and Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA. His work was included in the Haugesund International Relief Festival in Norway and the Ionian Arts Center in Greece. Suarez’s work is included in the SGCI archives of the Zuckerman Museum in Kennesaw, GA. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. He has held residencies at The Penland School of Craft, Bakersville, NC; Stove Works, Chattanooga, TN; The Hambidge Center, Rabun Gap, GA; and The Ionian Center for the Arts. Forthcoming residencies include The Bemis Center in Omaha, NE. He is the director of Eso Tilin Projects and was part of the Studio Artist Program at Atlanta Contemporary from 2021 to 2023. He lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. He has two cats.

Major funding provided by the Charles Loridans Foundation, PNC Foundation, The Antinori Foundation  and The Molly Blank Fund of the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.