Material History: Dreamsong debuts Edgar Arceneaux's mirror works at Frieze LA

 

The hardest part of writing about art is figuring out where to begin. You could dive right in with a physical description of the artwork, but that can feel a bit like putting the cart before the horse — the what before the why. Artists typically create their work in pursuit of a concept or an intention, or, quite often, the work grows out of autobiography, so maybe you would be wise to start with a story. There's also the larger cultural history an artwork might attempt to reference or refute, so the question can become how far back do we need to go to get a good running start? To engage with an artist’s work is to grapple with context — to try all the doors until the right one opens.

My studio visit with Edgar Arceneaux began quite literally with an open door. This past August, just as I was walking up to the MCAD MFA studio building where Arceneaux had set up a temporary studio, he was dragging two chairs out of the entrance so that we could start our conversation outside under the summer sun. Based in LA, Arceneaux was here at the invitation of the Walker Art Center for a residency with additional support from MCAD and Dreamsong, and he had spent time here off and on throughout 2024, working diligently down in MCAD's windowless basement studios on a new series of works. He was eager for some fresh air. Whether by design or by accident, the context for the work we were about to discuss was already forming in the warm breeze, the background chatter of men on the porch of the halfway house across the street, and the low hum of a Minneapolis neighborhood alive in the afternoon.

It seems like a lifetime ago, writing this now under the frozen February sky — not just because of the change in weather but also the harrowing change in climate. Our current political reality looks even darker than we dreamed possible back then, and Los Angeles, where this new body of work will be shown for the first time in Dreamsong’s booth at Frieze Art Fair this weekend, is still reeling from the fires that engulfed the city just one long month ago. But the passage of time is one of Arceneaux’s concerns and one of the tools he used to create the work on display: a series of abstract works titled Skinning the Mirror.

Behind the work is a complicated technical process that can be hard to wrap your head around even when you're looking right at it: Arceneaux takes old mirrors and chemically scrapes off the backing, leaving only the glass and silver nitrate — the reflective surface itself. Working primarily on the floor, Arceneaux then paints on top of the mirrors and adheres them to canvas, eventually peeling the canvas back up and bringing with it remnants of the paint, silver nitrate, and glass. The results are mixed media paintings that swirl, smudge, crack, and corrode, giving us little glimpses of ourselves through the dirty mirror of time and place.

“I was interested in the material because it troubles the gaze,” he told me back in August. “If you look at an artwork and then it's glaring back at you, it becomes kind of a reciprocal event. It becomes an active exchange.”

 

Top: Edgar Arceneaux, Skinning the Mirror (Winter 4), 2024. Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on canvas. 50 x 36 in. Bottom: Skinning the Mirror (Spring 4), 2024. Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on canvas 38 x 27 in. Images courtesy of Dreamsong and the artist.

 

Down in the basement at MCAD, he had turned his studio into a laboratory — first chemically treating the old mirrors to remove their protective backing, then laying them backside up on the floor and painting on top of them. In the end, after layers of paint and hours of pondering, Arceneaux applies bare canvas across the mirrored surface, painting colors on the backside that will bleed through to the composition on the other side. There’s a long waiting period before he peels the canvas up, sometimes followed by a second round of the whole process. It's similar to printmaking, really, and when the canvas is finally peeled back up from the mirror's glass, the works then exist in reverse, themselves inverted like a reflection. The final compositions are also a balance between chance and control.

“For whatever reason, the mirror remembers the first stroke,” he explained. Everything else gets muddied and obscured in the process. “Sometimes the silver doesn't want to adhere, and then it tears and it rips holes. So part of the activity of the making is me trying to imagine what's possible to be seen.”

In this way, the finished canvases play not just with chance but with time, burying the most recent layers at the back. It doesn’t stop there, though. Newly exposed to the air and the elements, these ragged silver skins continue changing over time, photochemically reacting to their surroundings until Arceneaux eventually seals them. And here we come back not just to any sunny August afternoon but to that specific one in this specific town: Skinning the Mirror is a series about the balance between accident and intention in the history of a place.

 

Top: Sections of mirror being prepared for paint on the floor of Arceneaux's temporary studio. Photos by Russ White. Bottom: Arceneaux applying paint to the mirrors at MCAD. Photo courtesy of Dreamsong and the artist.

 

Arceneaux made this work here instead of home in LA, he explained, “because you guys do have seasons, like real seasons. You have real winters and triumphant springs.” He created each piece with one of these seasons in mind, adding green paint for summer or purple flowers for spring or arctic white for winter. Some of the paintings directly reference maps, taking the twists and turns of the Mississippi River as the basis of their composition. And when each of the works have been peeled up — sometimes with physical shards of the broken mirrors still dangling from the canvas — Arceneaux placed them in different locations around town, from Dreamsong’s basement in Northeast to Cameron Downey’s grandmother’s living room in North, so that the works could spend their own seasons reacting to the temperatures and chemicals specific to their temporary locations.

“What happens when the smell of food is touching it?” Arceneaux wondered. “What happens in that environment?” These spaces — these contexts — become co-authors of the work, their dust and DNA interacting with the silver nitrate to create a patina specific to themselves. The works become portraits of this place and this time through which, in the end, we can catch glimpses of ourselves. In a place as complicated as Minneapolis, like all of America, there is no single, universal experience of living here. Everything has its own context. The murder of George Floyd and everything that has happened here since highlight this disparity better than anything. “I was partially inspired by that kind of break, that kind of rupture that had happened here in a place like this,” he said. “And as beautiful as it is, it still deals with the same kind of political realities. But that's not really what the paintings are about either.” Coming into play here are the layers not just of paint or of politics but of personal history, as well.

 

Top: Edgar Arceneaux, Skinning the Mirror (Summer 2), 2025. Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on canvas 38 x 27 in. Bottom: Skinning the Mirror (Summer 1), 2025. Acrylic paint, silver nitrate, glass on canvas. 80 x 120 in. Images courtesy of Dreamsong and the artist.

 

“In my practice, I usually work with a history, and then I'll merge that with some sort of material process and then a personal story.” The third element in this case is his mother’s diagnosis with dementia, a terrible disease that manifests as its own kind of cracked mirror.

While caring for her during her illness and death, Arceneaux saw in his material processes a reflection of her own decline — her skin sagging and her muscles growing weak — but also a certain bittersweet optimism. “She fundamentally stayed herself, which taught me something about humanity, you know what I mean? Even when all of the civilized aspects of ourselves — our religion, all that stuff — was forgotten, she was still that sweet person until she passed.” Here, in a sense, is a counterexample: a life that had been stripped of its context and yet remained true to itself.

But here and now, with all the mirror works stretched, sealed, and shipped off to Los Angeles, we cannot escape context. Art historians have often tried to pluck abstractionists — especially white ones — out of the flow of history, allowing their work to exist above place and time in the nebulous realm of simple “genius.” But, of course, no such vacuum exists. Arceneaux’s work not only occurs within the continuum of artists like Mark Bradford, Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, and Jack Whitten, it also responds physically, chemically, to the realities of this world and the different lived experiences of the people within it. His work is a sort of Rorschach test, offering us a view of beauty and ugliness, duration and stillness, a scorched earth and a vibrant, living moment. ◼︎ 

 

Dreamsong's booth (F12) at Frieze Los Angeles 2025. Photo courtesy of Dreamsong.

 

Frieze LA runs February 20 – 23 at the Santa Monica Airport. To see more of Edgar Arceneaux's work, visit Dreamsong's website, Arceneaux's website, or on Instagram @edgar_three.