Edgar Arceneaux -- Skinning the Mirror 5

Edgar Arceneaux
Skinning The Mirror (5), 2024
Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on paper
9 x 7 in.

Edgar Arceneaux's Skinning The Mirror series speaks pointedly about time, its passage, and the complicated evolution of personal, political and ecological histories. The cycles of seasons and their strange permutations – our warming climate and the ecologies it disappears – have antecedents in our past, but they are also new. By shattering mirrors, Arceneaux questions what we assume to know as true, how we see ourselves, and critically, what we remember those things to be. Through process and composition, and his engagement with the particular stories of particular places and times, Arceneaux highlights a fragile continuity in reflective surfaces that allows us to peer through time at ourselves in the present moment.

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. He has had solo exhibitions at such institutions as The Kitchen, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, the Vera List Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Museum für 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, The Bronx Museum, Performa 15, The Whitney Museum, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art in Oslo, Norway, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, among other venues.

Areneaux's work is represented in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum, MOMA, The Hammer Museum, MOCA LA, The Walker Art Center, Institute of Art, Ludwig Museum (Cologne), Orange County Museum of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among other esteemed collections. Arceneaux is currently Associate Professor of Art at USC. He 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).