Frieze LA 2025

Frieze LA 2025

In Edgar Arceneaux’s Skinning the Mirror series, the artist paints, shatters and strips salvaged mirrors, transferring their reflective surfaces on to paintings. This process creates tactile gestures that burnish and deepen with age as the silver nitrate absorbs elements of the atmosphere, altering its tone and color until sealed.

Invited to Minneapolis by the Walker Art Center and hosted by Dreamsong, Arceneaux has produced this new body of work in 2024. Centering icy blues, stark whites and silvers, their palette evokes the quiet serenity of Northern winters. Skinning the Mirror began while Arceneaux cared for his mother through dementia, watching her lose a sense of self and ultimately, grieving her death. Deeply personal and rich with metaphoric meaning, Arceneaux’s paintings not only absorb the invisible characteristics of their environs, but in their cracked reflections, materialize the fragmentary nature of self-understanding and the gaps and fissures embedded within broader socio-historical narratives.