The Fallby Edgar Arceneaux

Dreamsong is pleased to present The Fall, our debut exhibition with Edgar Arceneaux (b. 1972, Los Angeles) featuring new paintings and recent sculpture by Edgar Arceneaux. 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. For The Fall, a title with an intentional dual-entendre that reflects not only the season which the paintings reflect, but suggests a sentiment regarding the political situation in America at this time. 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.