Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present, Skinning the Mirror, a new body of work by Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux on view in our Greenhouse Gallery July 24 – August 21, 2021.

Over the past two decades, Arceneaux has engaged in an expansive multi-media practice where linear logic is typically abandoned in favor of experimentation, association, and where seemingly disparate elements find synchronicity and new possibilities in the artist’s hands.

In this new series of material-based abstractions, Arceneaux has pioneered the utilization of silver nitrate — used in the fabrication of mirrors — into a painting medium. As in the act of skinning, the artist’s entire body becomes part of the process; his labor, sweat, and blood contribute to determining the outcome of each work.

Fractures, cracks, and breaks produce web-like fissures of color, texture, and in-between spaces. The surfaces of the works are comprised of seepages, extrusions, and deformations that appear as if geological movements frozen in time. Conversely, the canvas-based works are each presented loosely, embracing fragility and a feeling of impossible stasis.

Arceneaux’s mother, Merc Arceneaux Sr. passed away from dementia during the time he was generating this body of work. Being her caretaker and nurse for half a year, Arceneaux experienced the vulnerability of the mind and the body, as well as the poetics of loss.

Arceneaux says of this time, “Everything cracks when the mother dies, a shattering in the brain and the family. Dementia, the slow mental deterioration of the mind and body, mixes up actual and imagined memories into a confusing puzzle. I could be at one instance the son, the father, then the brother, or my mother’s husband. It revealed to me a fundamental truth, no person is an individual, we are a platitude of relationships. Though these works are not autobiographical or narrative, the poetics of loss, grief, and love are in there.”

Throughout his practice, Arceneaux has consistently utilized the mirror as an associative metaphor to trouble the gaze and explore gaps in history and memory, however these newest works evoke a confrontation of vast intersections between materiality, self, and the world around us — in the artist’s words: “the paintings don’t reflect you; they are you.”

Edgar Arceneaux (b. 1972, Los Angeles) works in the fields of drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and video; often exploring connections between historical events and present-day truths. Arceneaux has had solo exhibitions at such institutions as The Kitchen, Studio Museum Harlem, New York; the Vera List Center at MIT in Cambridge, Mass; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum in Harlem and Museum fur Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria.

His work has also been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art, Oslo; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; Bronx Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Performa 15, New York; Whitney Museum, New York, and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, among other venues.

The artist’s work resides in such collections as the Whitney Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Orange County Museum of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Arceneaux attended the California Institute of the Arts (MFA, 2001), Fachhochschule Aachen (2000), the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1999), and Art Center College of Design (BFA, 1996). Arceneaux’s new play Boney Manilli will premiere in the US in 2022 at the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. Arceneaux received the prestigious Mike Kelley Foundation Award in 2019 and the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship in 2020. He serves on the Board of Directors at Creative Capital and is an Associate Professor of Art at the Roski School of Art and Design, USC.