Frieze LAFrieze LA
February 20 – 23, 2025
Santa Monica Airport
Santa Monica, CA
For Frieze LA 2025 (Focus Booth F12), Dreamsong is pleased to present new paintings by Edgar Arceneaux (b. 1972, Los Angeles) made in Minneapolis during a 2024 residency organized by the Walker Art Center. Expanding on the artist's Skinning the Mirror series, the Minneapolis paintings allude to a changing climate and mark a departure towards a distinct sense of place and landscape. Underpinning the series is a rigorous practice spanning over twenty years that explores race and collective memory by interrogating American historical narratives and probing their gaps, omissions, and failures.
Arceneaux paints, shatters and strips mirrors, transferring the silver nitrate on to canvas. As his paintings’ reflective surfaces oxidize, they absorb elements of the atmosphere, altering the colors until sealed and producing abstractions that glint and shift in the light, capturing fragments of their viewer’s reflections. Aged in the homes of artists, activists and community members, the works contain the DNA of Minneapolis, a city that inspired a global protest movement against police brutality and racial inequality following the murder of George Floyd. 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 that the Minneapolis uprising sought to address.
Building on this foundation, the paintings also reflect Minnesota's varied ecologies, charting its seasons through compositional choices and defined color palettes. From icy blues, stark whites, and silvers that evoke the quiet serenity of Northern winters, through the freshly loamed earth and verdant green buds of spring to the vanishingly deep blues and reds of a summer sky moments after sunset, Arceneaux captures the land’s cyclical rhythms. Using the remnants and palette of each season as an underpainting for the next, the artist highlights a fragile continuity in reflective surfaces that allow us to peer through time at ourselves in the present moment.
Arceneaux began the Skinning the Mirror series when he cared for his mother through dementia, watching her lose her sense of self and, ultimately, grieving her death. These works complicate the construction of knowledge through broken, layered, and sculptural surfaces that burnish and deepen with age until sealed. Arceneaux says of the time: "Dementia, the slow mental deterioration of the mind and body, mixes up actual and imagined memories into a confusing puzzle. Though these works are not autobiographical or narrative, the poetics of loss, grief, and love are in there."
Works from Arceneaux’s Skinning the Mirror series have been shown widely, including at the Tapei Biennial, Susanne Vielmetter and Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles. Arceneaux has had solo exhibitions at such institutions as The Kitchen, The Studio Museum Harlem, The Vera List Center at MIT, The Hammer Museum, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Linz, Austria as well as numerous group exhibitions including Church for Sale, Works from the Haubrok Collection and the Nationalgalerie Collection at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart (2022), which took its name from a series of works by Arceneaux that show billboards from the bankruptcy-threatened city of Detroit advertising the sale of church properties and, thus, the community-forming meeting rooms they provided. His work is represented in the permanent collections of major museums globally, including MOMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou and The Walker Art Center, among other esteemed collections.

Edgar Arceneaux, Skinning the Mirror (Summer 1), 2025 (detail). Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on canvas. 80 x 120 x 3 in.

Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Summer 1), 2025. Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on canvas. 80 x 120 in.

Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Summer 1), 2025.

Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Summer 4), 2025. Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on canvas. 50 x 36 in.

Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Summer 4), 2025 (detail).

Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Winter 4), 2024. Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on canvas. 50 x 36 in.

Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Winter 4), 2024 (detail).

Edgar Arceneaux, Skinning the Mirror (Summer 1), 2025 (detail). Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on canvas. 80 x 120 x 3 in.

Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Summer 1), 2025. Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on canvas. 80 x 120 in.

Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Summer 1), 2025.

Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Summer 4), 2025. Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on canvas. 50 x 36 in.

Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Summer 4), 2025 (detail).

Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Winter 4), 2024. Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on canvas. 50 x 36 in.

Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Winter 4), 2024 (detail).