Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA) Summer Exhibits (wednesdays)

From the venue:

Sergio Suarez: Traces of an unseen Fire

Jun 21, 2025 - Aug 16, 2025

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.

Celebration: The Past Forward – Deepening Our Scope, James Herbert

Jun 21, 2025 - Aug 16, 2025

Image above: Detail of James Herbert’s Whirling Man, 1999, Acrylic on canvas, 82 x 91.5 inches, Gift of the Artist

Continuing our year-long celebration, marking 25 years since the signing of MOCA GA’s articles of incorporation and 501C3 status, we look back at our mission and collecting initiatives. Over the years MOCA GA has been favored by wonderful supporters who have donated or purchased work for the permanent collection. In doing so, we have had opportunities to collect works by a number of artists in depth.

One very important Georgia Artist of which MOCA GA is proud to have a significant number of works is James Herbert, a filmmaker and painter who taught both mediums at the University of Georgia for 45 years! Two of his paintings, Windmills, 1978 and Spirit Man, 1992 were part of the founding collection and upon retiring from teaching in 2006, the Artist himself donated an early work on paper titled Pyramid Scheme, from 1973. Between 2013 and 2020 MOCA GA received eight additional works from a number of donors.

Collecting initiatives that span an artist’s entire oeuvre or simply bridge a number of years, give more robust insight into an artist’s development with regard to style, process, and themes. Additional archival acquisitions such as collateral exhibition materials, statements, reviews, sketchbooks and correspondence serve to deepen our understanding of an artist’s intent as well as the public’s perception at a particular moment in recent history. In early 2003 for example, MOCA GA’s Film/Video: Georgia exhibition included a viewing of an early film by James Herbert in conjunction with artwork.