KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is proud to present Sea Change Todo Cambia, a solo exhibition by C.J. Chueca, on view from May 15 to June 15, 2025. Featuring twelve new ceramic and mosaic works, the exhibition marks Chueca’s first solo show with the gallery and continues her deep engagement with memory, migration, and transformation through abstraction. Drawing from intimate observations and broader geopolitical shifts, "Sea Change / Todo Cambia" captures the contrasting moments between public and private with tenderness and poetry.

The exhibition’s title borrows from the beloved Latin American anthem "Todo Cambia", composed by Chilean musician Julio Numhauser and famously interpreted by Mercedes Sosa. Sung in acapela, the song plays in the gallery as an undercurrent, threading together Chueca’s ceramic works like a tide. In this moment of global flux and migration, the song’s lyrics—“Change, everything changes”—resonate as a subtle refrain for the exhibition. They also speak to Chueca’s ongoing exploration of personal and political transition, informed by her life as a Peruvian immigrant moving between Lima, Mexico City, and New York.

At the heart of "Sea Change / Todo Cambia" is a new body of hand-built ceramic works from Chueca’s "Becoming Water" series—that evoke the sensation of being submerged. Glazed in watery blues and fired up to three times or more, these pieces glisten with depth, echoing the interior of a pool. These works are paired with similar size and shape pieces that are called "Behind, a shore" and installed in a different wall. Pools, for Chueca, are rooms that hold memory: a mental space of containment, reflection, and vulnerability. Inspired by her own swimming routine and emotional healing journey, her works suggest a private space where breath and thought synchronize. "Submerged is a special state,” she notes. “It’s not spiritual, but it is physical—your breathing changes. It’s a space of heightened awareness."

Chueca’s long-standing interest in the metaphor of walls as bodies—porous, worn, marked—is also present here. In earlier series, she photographed abandoned or squatted buildings, treating their deteriorated walls as testaments to the living. Later, she began creating her own "walls" out of tile and wood, drawing from the grid systems of subway stations and public spaces. These motifs reappear in Becoming Water, now softened and abstracted. The show also includes a horizontal blue mosaic work stretching 80 inches across one wall that gradually changes from light to dark blue, a horizon line calibrated to mark the height between being submerged and being able to breathe.

This exhibition is perhaps Chueca’s most personal to date. Grounded in personal healing, it navigates the emotional complexities of departure, return, and transformation. It reflects on loss—of place, of loved ones, of stability—while imagining new modes of connection and the hopeful possibility of making changes, taking a step into the unknown. Drawing from her experience of photographing patients in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager and her ongoing engagement with neurodivergent communities to understand the vast capacity of the mind, Chueca invites us into a space of empathy and expansive thinking. Her material choices—ceramic, audio, mosaics—fuse the ephemeral and the enduring, what fades with what remains.

In "Sea Change / Todo Cambia", C.J. Chueca builds a room made of water, memory, and song. It is a space for healing but also for reckoning—with ourselves, with our histories, and with the ever-changing world around us.

C.J. Chueca was born in Lima - Peru, and lives New York since 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include: “Mermaids in the Basement”, curated by Blanca de la Torre at the Sugar Hill Museum in New York; "We are night and day" at FX Collaborative, New York; the two person show: “What Lies Beneath” at Kates-Ferri Projects, New York; “La Huida” at Vigil Gonzales Galería-Buenos Aires, “I am the river behind the wall" at Mulherin Gallery in Toronto; "Dos Cielos Azules/Two Blue Skies" at ICPNA (Instituto Cultural Peruano Norteamericano) for which she released a monograph published in collaboration with Meier Ramirez and VM& Studio. Recent group shows include: “Construyendo Memorias" curated by Charles Moore at Art Latinou, Mexico City; "A Very Anxious Feeling: Voices of Unrest in the American Experience; 20 Years of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection" curated by Amethyst Rey Beaver and Eva Thornton at the Taubman Museum of Art; “Crónicas Migrantes” curated by Fabiola Arroyo at MAC Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Lima; "Hay algo incomestible en la garganta" curated by Miguel A. Lopez at ICPNA; among others. She made a public commission in Montreal curated by Dulce Pinzón at Palais des Congres as part of Art Souterrain. She is currently working in a permanent public commission in the Bronx managed by Percent for Art, from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, DDC and DT. 

Available Art Work from Exhibition 

Exhibition Catalogue

Video of exhibition on YouTube