CJ Chueca Solo Exhibition

Cecilia Jurado (CJ) Chueca has been a nomadic being her whole life. Her maternal grandfather was an orphan who traveled in a warship and eventually found a putative father in Valparaiso, Chile. He migrated to Perú’s capital city, Lima from a small town called Muquiyauyo-Jauja, located in the high mountains of the Andes. She moved to New York in 2003 after several homes in Lima, Mexico City and Oaxaca. Chueca’s history is the history of perpetual migration, leading her to explore the concepts of home, territory, transition, multiculturality, uprooting and solitude. In some ways she focuses on those lives that are still “on the road” (or without a route) in the streets of the world. Eleanor Heartney writes in her essay: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Chueca creates walls that neither contain nor separate. Instead, they provide insight into the complex ways that walls operate in our lives. In addition to ceramic walls, she has been working on other ceramic objects that depict transition as an ongoing series of airplane windows titled “We are Night and Day.”

On a parallel path, Chueca is mesmerized by the power of water and its never ending ride, its ability to pass through the smallest gaps, its condition as an eternal traveler. We are water, as we are rivers that will eventually mix with other rivers in the deepest water of the ocean.