Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present new works by Edgar Arceneaux for this year’s edition of The Armory Show.

Edgar Arceneaux’s Skinning the Mirror series harnesses the alchemical qualities of silver nitrate, a pre-modern technology that transforms glass into mirrors, to explore notions of identity, place, and cycles of life and death. Arceneaux’s paintings decouple the silver nitrate from its mirrored substrate and mix the substance with glass and acrylic in bold gestural abstractions.

The resulting works blur the boundaries between figure and ground, positive and negative space, chance and intention. Arceneaux’s multi-media practice across painting, drawing, installation and sculpture pulls from science fiction, civil rights era speeches, techno music, and the architecture of Detroit, and finds synchronicity through changing states of matter and meaning.

Edgar Arceneaux was born in 1972 in Los Angeles, and lives and works in Pasadena, California. He is a graduate of Art Center College of Design (BFA, 1996) and the California Institute for the Arts (MFA, 2001). He is an Associate Professor of Art for Roski School of Art and Design at USC. He played a seminal role in the creation of the Watts House Project, a redevelopment initiative to remodel a series of houses around the Watts Towers, serving as director from 1999 to 2012. His work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2008), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Performa 15, New York; and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, among other venues.

Recent solo exhibitions include Skinning The Mirror, Vielmetter Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Edgar Arceneaux, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Library of Black Lies, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Edgar Arceneaux, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Written in Smoke and Fire, MIT LIST Center for Contemporary Art, Cambridge, MA; and Hopelessness Freezes Time 1967 Detroit Riots, Detroit Techno and Michael Heizer’s Dragged Mass, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland. Arceneaux has also had solo exhibitions at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; REDCAT, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Studio Museum Harlem, New York. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art, Oslo, Norway; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; the Bronx Museum, New York, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; and MCA Chicago, Chicago, IL.

Arceneaux’s work resides in many public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the New York Public Library, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; among others.