Frieze Los Angeles Booth E17
Charlie James Gallery is pleased to present a presentation of works by Ozzie Juarez and Jackie Amézquita at Frieze Los Angeles 2025 in Booth E17.
The booth will feature a suite of paintings on fabricated metal gates by Ozzie Juarez in a continuation of the series first presented in the artist’s 2024 solo exhibition at the gallery. These works bring together elements of history and fantasy with signifiers of Los Angeles’ contemporary landscape, blending the visual languages of urban sprawl, history painting, animation, and kitsch in ways that speak to the artist’s deep roots in the city and many of its less celebrated corners and cultures.
Several of the works incorporate fantastical imagined landscapes, their soft focus reminiscent of dreams or vintage cartoons. Juarez’s titles convey a sense of contemplative quiet that seems at odds with the flashy sonidero text style that bears them. Many include images of Mesoamerican step pyramids, and two smaller works directly juxtapose the pyramid with a turreted, European-style castle, each bearing a single towering structure at the end of a wandering path. Elsewhere, a sleek, ropily muscled Xoloitzcuintli sits at alert in three-quarter view amidst a serene landscape. Dating back to a thriving pre-Columbian past, both the pyramid and the Xolo serve as symbols of Mexican heritage and pride.
The gates supporting these paintings are of the sort that might span the entrance to a scrap yard or auto-body shop: rusted surfaces with spiked tops. The prevalence of this kind of barrier in the Los Angeles landscape counteracts any feeling of menace in the hulking forms, yet even on a gallery wall they retain a sense of guardianship, of protection; a barring of entry both visual and physical. The observer can’t help but wonder what these rusted gates might be shielding from view. Three small paintings play with the idea of the guard dog that often sits behind gates such as these, but Juarez depicts them in the extra-cute style of cartoons and figurines, subverting expectations around the kinds of things one might find.
Rust often carries a connotation of urban blight – it spreads on untended surfaces and becomes a desirable playground for graffiti writers and metal scrappers. Juarez plays with ideas of beauty and ugliness, softness and severity as he juxtaposes hard metal with dreamy fantasy worlds.
This rust is the product of a chemical process the artist developed a talent for when finishing sets for Disney, which often included artificially aging surfaces. Rust has a mind of its own, however, and the results are often surprising. Its texture is similar to that of a rough paper and its stippled finish shows through areas of the painted surface. The works are inherently sculptural, with their hinges and clasps and barbed finish. A small, unique lock adorns each gate in a nod to the culture of swap meets, in which Juarez grew up working with his family and where every tiny object carries a precious and valuable story.
For Frieze Los Angeles 2025, Jackie Amézquita's latest body of work materializes five stages of regeneration, offering a profound meditation on community, ancestral memory, and the ability to shape unseen futures. Each of the five vessels, standing on cinder blocks made from bio-char (ash), symbolize the five stages of regeneration: nightfall, first-light, passage, community, and dreams. Echoing forms of Mesoamerican vessel ceramics for cacao ceremonies, they evoke both fragility and endurance, translating Indigenous knowledge onto chemically bound materials through processes of firing and drying. These vessels are living entities, bearing the weight of interwoven histories and the potential for renewal– composing the very fabric of the cosmos.
Iconographically, the work references a divine woman giving birth as a deity signifying creation and renewal. Materials such as cochineal, copper, and banana liquid patina mark the passage of time, while the vessels stand as reconfigured homes, reflecting the precarious conditions of displacement on the body. Amezquita’s act of making is deeply intuitive, attuned to the temporality of charcoal bound into cinder blocks, and maize and soil shaped by traditional pinch pot and coil methods embodying transformation and intergenerational memory.
Through this work, Amézquita engages in a dialogue between grief and hope, urging us to hold space for both. These vessels, rooted in collective memory, channel the past while envisioning a future where community and solidarity offer foundations for renewal. By conjuring a quiet energy of remembrance and rebirth, she affirms a Mesoamerican cosmovisions that relies on acts of seeing as an embodiment of continual cycles of becoming and creation.
FRIEZE PROJECTS
Amézquita is contributing an ambitious new work created for Frieze Los Angeles 2025, presented in partnership with Maestro Dobel Tequila and Art Production Fund. The piece is part of Frieze Projects, curated by Art Production Fund under the title ‘Inside Out’, which sees various artists riff on the intersection between personal histories and Los Angeles’s environs.
Situated on three outdoor soccer fields, Amézquita’s installation ruminates on her origins as a Guatemalan immigrant to Southern California, as well as the ways in which humans migrate to new landscapes, in turn adding new layers of meaning to environments already replete with stories. The new work is rooted in her fascination with data patterns, specifically those tracing global human migration throughout history. Through these studies, she learned that migration from Asia to the Americas in centuries past was not linear but rather followed a curve. Stretching 190 by 80 feet, Amézquita’s immersive installation is designed so that audiences mirror this pattern. By entering at the eastern side of the soccer fields, then wending their way on a curved trajectory, participants activate the space in an act that the artist describes as forming ‘invisible lines of connections’.
The materials Amézquita utilizes in the piece – including many pounds of lava rock sourced from Mammoth Lakes near Yosemite National Park, Mexican corn, Indonesian blue pea flower, and soil and ocean water from Los Angeles – also nod to past lineages. Ancient civilizations including the Maya – an important source of inspiration for Amézquita – incorporated lava rock matter into their grand central plazas, which served as focal gathering places for their communities.
Juarez will also have a site-specific performance and installation work included in the Frieze Projects exhibition Inside Out, curated by Art Production Fund. This work highlights the unique material and visual culture of LA’s swap meets, which thrive on the hustle and creativity of largely immigrant and marginalized communities. Juarez grew up fully immersed in this culture while working with his family at swap meets and continues to visit markets throughout the city. He will recreate a swap meet stall at Frieze Projects and fill the space with found and created objects, while himself acting as market vendor. This work “brings a little bit of South Central to Santa Monica,” temporarily collapsing the distinction between art selling practices at two very different ends of the spectrum.