Edgar Arceneaux: We Are Gods at Vielmetter Los Angeles
- LA Art Documents
- 16 hours ago
- 2 min read
Edgar Arceneaux
We Are Gods
Vielmetter, Los Angeles, CA
May 9 — June 27, 2026
"In 2020, Edgar Arceneaux added process painting to his multimedia art practice. The paintings included in We Are Gods continue this sustained inquiry of the intersection of abstraction and materiality. The exhibition title alludes to a metaphysical continuum that connects life and death. This is the artist’s third gathering of Skinning the Mirror, an ongoing series of paintings composed of acrylic and mirror on canvas. Making paintings from small to mural size, Arceneaux tests material processes against scale as a means to consider a body in relation to vision, and in relation to making. The paintings comprising We Are Gods demonstrate Arceneaux’s expanding investigations of expression via color and composition.
The series title Skinning the Mirror directs our attention to process; it is simply what has to be done to make the work. Arceneaux skins mirrors, separating the reflecting skin of silver nitrate from a sourced glass mirror. Compositions emerge by chance and by design, with the artist steering entropic forces. Removal, mirror, and laborious chemical processes have been integral to Arceneaux’s work since at least 1999, when he began Drawings of Removal, a series of drawing installations that made tangible memories and places erased from both personal and public histories. These works were about his father. The concept and practice of removal was, for the artist, a form of accounting, and then, as an ongoing series, an accumulation. The mirror as warping device is central to the Library of Black Lies (2013–18). While Arceneaux’s recent abstractions may seem a significant shift in his oeuvre, Skinning the Mirror continues his critical inquiry of mirror and mirroring, metaphorical vision and blindness, and dismantling to create.
