Artist Statement
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My drawings, sculptures, and installations address topics ranging from cultural conventions to urban blight. For the last several years, I have been making work in response to urban struggles in Detroit, Michigan. As the historic location of one of the largest race riots in this country, and more recently as a symbol of economic decline, Detroit serves as a focal point for understanding how macroscopic social and economic forces overwhelm and fundamentally change the lives of individual people. By drawing comparisons between this very specific location and historical time to earlier epochs of Western civilizations, my work forms historical connections between different moments that reveal truths about modern reality, attesting both to its transitional nature as to its primitive stage. [End Page 929]
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Edgar Arceneaux, Blind Pig #6 (2011) Acrylic and graphite on paper (60” x 72”)
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Edgar Arceneaux, American Natural History (2009) Acrylic and graphite on paper (60” x 91”)
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Edgar Arceneaux, Untitled (2004) Colored paper, tape, and pencil on frosted vellum (41 ½” x 42”)
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Edgar Arceneaux, Dragged Mass as Allegory (2009) Acrylic and graphite on paper (63” x 91”)
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EDGAR ARCENEAUX, born in 1972, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. In 1996, he received the BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA, and the MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, in 2001, having also studied (2000-2001) at Fachhochschule Aachen, Aachen, Germany. Solo and group exhibitions of his work have appeared in museums, galleries, and other art venues in Berlin, Moscow, Detroit, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Oslo, Basel, London, Rotterdam, Prague, Los Angeles, Montréal, Edinburgh, Sydney, Warsaw, São Paulo, Tel Aviv, Chicago, Reykjavik, and many other major cities. He has received various forms of recognition for his work as an artist—e.g., REDCAT Award, REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; the Rauschenberg Residency, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, FL; United States Artists Fellowship, United States Artists, Los Angeles, CA; Creative Capital Grant, New York, NY; Joyce Award, The Joyce Foundation, Chicago, IL; and the William H. Johnson Award, the William H. Johnson Foundation for the Arts, Los Angeles, CA. Jeffrey Kastner has asserted that Arceneaux’s “conceptual program uncovers meaning in unexpected adjacencies and sees beauty in tangential leaps. The artist’s practice takes advantage not only of his intellectual restlessness but also his wide-ranging technical adroitness, a mix of multidisciplinary skills—including drawing, photography, sculpture, and filmmaking—that figure into the unorthodox installation scenarios he has developed and refined over the last decade.”
