Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present Skinning the Mirror, the gallery’s eleventh solo presentation by Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux, featuring a cohesive installation of multi-media paintings and sculpture.

On this recent series of material-based abstractions, art historian Julian Myers-Szupinska writes:

The matter of mirrors is central to Edgar Arceneaux’s new body of work. This is figuratively true—they are about mirrors and the self-relations they enable—and factually the case, as each artwork is derived from a found mirror. Through a strenuous process that is both chemical and physical, Arceneaux has decoupled the mirror’s reflective metal backing from its rigid glass substrate and imposed it onto loose canvas. That this is not a smooth or simple process is evident in the objects that result from it. The transfer is often rocky and incomplete—sometimes the transfer doesn’t take completely. And one witnesses across the ongoing series evidence of rippling, concussion-like impacts, where glass substrate broken along the way has impressed its fragmentation onto the distressed visual field. One sees, too, the layering of colors, black, rust, and toxic verdigris, that parse as gestural—even abstract.

These are mirrors that have, as Arceneaux tells it, been “skinned,” as one might skin the carcass of a hunter’s prey. Something of the uncanny beauty and horror of this image persists in the works. These mirrors, once “alive,” are now “dead,” and their chemical viscera placed on view. Too, the loose-hung canvases convey the weird effect of the death-shroud, impressed with the holy image of the cadaver beneath. These associations, derived from our quasi-mystical sense of mirrors as the repositories of the bodies they once reflected, coexist with the works’ other, equally necessary states of being. They are, simultaneously, direct records of their own physical process of creation, and an estranged sort of abstraction, extruded with difficulty from the readymade object they once were. The objects demand we think all these things at once, in an unfolding loop: death, object, process, abstraction, process, object, death.

What is a mirror? A simple optical device designed to extend our view, it is among the oldest of human prosthetics, reaching back to the earliest human civilizations. And where other such items of the era—stone axes, wood bows—have faded from contemporary life, mirrors have, by contrast, insinuated themselves ever farther into our daily habits, our ways of knowing ourselves and our means of getting around. Mirrors are standard kit for modern bathrooms and bedrooms; they are attached by manufacturers to cars to help us drive. And as computers have developed, they have become ever more mirror-like. Boob-tube-like monitors gave way to cool black rectangles designed to capture our image and deliver it back to us yassified. In the process, mirrors have gained alongside their practical uses, a rich psychic dimension. Not for nothing did the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan describe the moment of human subject formation in the event of self-recognition using the metaphor of the mirror, as the “mirror stage.”

Glass shards, mirrors, and disfigurement have appeared throughout Arceneaux’s extensive practice, as metaphors for the fragmentary nature of self-understanding and the incompleteness of historical narratives. But where earlier works have relied on building up conceptual plays between existing historical signs—with the mirror as a volatile form of ambiguity inside that play—here, in these new works on canvas, the ambiguity takes center stage. The Skinning the Mirror works disruptively cast us into a prehistorical, pre-subjective ooze, and leave us gazing at the image that is reflected back at us when the mirror loses its function—when it fails to confirm our wholeness, our normalcy, our place in the world, the cherished images of ourselves.

Skinning The Mirror

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