We Are Gods

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to present We Are Gods, Edgar Arceneaux’s twelfth solo exhibition with the gallery. On the occasion of the exhibition, curator and writer Jenelle Porter reflects on Arceneaux’s newest body of work: "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. Arceneaux’s engagement with abstraction and process painting should be considered within a continuum of making that clicks through Rauschenberg’s layered transfers, Frankenthaler’s lush stains, and Whitten’s mosaiced tesserae. In Arceneaux’s latest works, the unifying motif is pink, a color that leads me to the studio doorstep of Philip Guston whose admixtures of cadmium red medium and titanium white ranged from rotting meat to bubblegum. Guston owns pink. But pink is one of those colors that remains so little used by artists that I’m inclined to make unsupported claims that pink doesn’t signify in painting histories in ways other colors have and do; the way black does, or blue, or green. In April 2026, when I look at Arceneaux’s work, I’m asking this: is pink the color of time? Amidst this breakage, is pink keeping time? Pink grounds these paintings in a state of perpetual flux. In Arceneaux’s figure/ground interactions, pink is warm to silver’s cool, softness to metallic glint, the flesh on the bone shards. Let’s think about breaking, because it feels like the world is breaking. Arceneaux breaks mirrors. That is how the shimmer you see on the canvas comes to be. Glass and mirror direct the gaze; here the artist fractures that gaze. However, I’m disinclined to think about breaking, in this case, as broken. Rather, I think these paintings break something open, break down to build back; they are fracturing devices for optical multiplication. Breakage and repair aren’t just processes for the artist, they’re methodologies. This is some high-altitude thinking, so I’ll return us to this world and to the artist’s most personal impulses, specifically to that which he shares publicly, that while his mother succumbed to dementia, the skinned mirrors came to symbolize how bodies break, yet continue to exist in their children and in metaphorical manifestations. In a second chapter of this series, the artist materialized the atmosphere by exposing the painting’s surfaces to shed DNA proteins. Not unlike photosensitive chemicals that capture an image, Arceneaux’s surfaces document, without fixing, their atmosphere/setting. The paintings become sites where the poetics of self-meet the poetics of material." —Jenelle Porter, April 2026 Edgar Arceneaux was born in 1972 in Los Angeles, and lives and works in Pasadena, California. He is a graduate of Art Center College of Design (BFA, 1996) and the California Institute for the Arts (MFA, 2001). He is an Associate Professor of Art for Roski School of Art and Design at USC. He played a seminal role in the creation of the Watts House Project, a redevelopment initiative to remodel a series of houses around the Watts Towers, serving as director from 1999 to 2012. Recent solo exhibitions include Edgar Arceneaux, A Joyner/Giuffrida Visiting Artists Program, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; Edgar Arceneaux, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal, Quebec, Canada; Library of Black Lies, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Edgar Arceneaux, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Written in Smoke and Fire, MIT LIST Center for Contemporary Art, Cambridge, MA; and Hopelessness Freezes Time 1967 Detroit Riots, Detroit Techno and Michael Heizer’s Dragged Mass, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland. Arceneaux has also had solo exhibitions at REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and the Studio Museum Harlem, NY. Arceneaux has been included in group exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annadale-On-Hudson, NY; the Bunker Art Space, West Palm Beach, FL; the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan; the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art, Oslo, Norway; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; the Bronx Museum, New York, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; The Haubrok Foundation, Berlin; and MCA Chicago, Chicago, IL. He has been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2008), Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Performa 15, NY and the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, among other venues. Arceneaux’s work resides in many public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Ludwig Museum, Cologne, Germany; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport, CA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the New York Public Library, New York, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Studio Museum, Harlem, NY; among others.