Edgar Arceneaux

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Edgar Arceneaux (born 1972, Los Angeles, U.S.) is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.
Arceneaux studied at California Institute of the Arts (MFA, 2001), and Art Center College of Design (BFA, 1996).
He is represented by Susanne Vielmetter [1] in Los Angeles and Stephan Adamski [2] in Aachen, Germany.

He has shown his drawings, sculptures, installations and films in solo exhibitions at The Kitchen, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Witte de With Museum, Rotterdam; UCLA Hammer Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Montgomery Gallery, Pomona College, among others. His collaboration with Charles Gaines, entitled "Snake River" has been shown at the Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria; and REDCAT Gallery, Los Angeles.

Arceneaux's work has been included in "Uncertain States of America" at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art, Oslo, Bard College, and Serpentine Gallery, London; "Tomorrowland: CalArts in Moving Pictures", Museum of Modern Art, New York; "The Imaginary Number", KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; "The Need to Document", Halle für Kunst e.V., Lüneburg; "Monuments for the USA", CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; "Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970", Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; "Quicksand", de Appel, Amsterdam, Netherlands; "Upside Down: Neueingerichtete Raeume zur Gegenwart", Ludwigforum Aachen, Germany; and "Persoenliche Plaene", Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, among others.

Arceneaux was recently awarded a residency at ArtPace, San Antonio, Texas. Edgar Arceneaux was named a 2007 USA Broad Fellow by United States Artists, a grant making organization which supports and promotes the work of American artists. Arceneaux was the subject of an Artforum feature by Jeffrey Kastner (February 2006), and his work was featured in Afterall in essays by Charles Gaines and Catrin Lorch. Arceneaux's books "Lost Library" and "107th Street, Watts" were published in 2003 by Kunstverein Ulm, Germany, and Revolver, Frankfurt, respectively.

Contents

[edit] Education

2001 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA www.calarts.edu

1996 BFA, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA www.artcenter.edu

2000-01 Fachhochschule Aachen, Aachen, Germany www.fh-aachen.de

1999 Skowhegan School of Painting, Skowhegan, Maine www.skowheganart.org

1998 The Banff Center for the Arts, Banff, Alberta, Canada www.banffcentre.ca

1998 Project Row Houses, Houston, Texas www.projectrowhouses.org

[edit] Whitney Biennial

Edgar Arceneaux was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2008, co-curated by Henriette Huldisch and Shamim Momin. [[3]]
The catalogue essay on his work follows below:

Probing strikingly incongruent sets of data for patterns of affinity, Edgar 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.
Arceneaux's early work often grew first and foremost from the act of rendering—his Drawings of Removal, an ongoing multivenue performance/production project begun in 1999 and first seen in New York in 2002 at the Studio Museum in Harlem, filled the different galleries where it was executed with dozens upon dozens of drawings directly on the walls of the gallery. Working in the exhibition space as a live studio, he repeatedly made, erased, redrew, scored, cut up, and reassembled the pencil on paper and velum images in a process designed to both mimic and provoke the mechanics of recollection. From early projects like this, Arceneaux's explorations have only increased in breadth and complexity. Cosmologies, both personal and scientific, are often woven into each other: in 2004's Borrowed Sun, for example, Arceneaux created an intertwined meditation on three major cultural figures—astronomer Galileo, musician Sun Ra, and artist Sol LeWitt—that read the trio's respective astronomical/religious, musical/ racial, and conceptual/perceptual systems against one another, teasing out surprising consonances between them via gorgeous charcoal drawings, sculptural elements like glass disks and a Minimalist wall of cinder blocks, and both 35mm slide and 16mm film projections.
Another of Arceneaux's recent large-scale projects is similarly representative of his exploration of the potential relationships between what at first might seem to be unlikely topics. His 2006 installation piece The Alchemy of Comedy . . . Stupid features the actor David Alan Grier [[4]] working out an introspective and frequently awkward comedy routine before a number of different audiences in a variety of venues. Shot under various lighting and compositional conditions, the resulting videos are presented on separate screens in the gallery (amid drawings and works on paper) in a complex geometrical array whose arrangement and palette turn out to be based on classic alchemical processes. The alchemists, Arceneaux recently noted, believed that their practice brought about changes not just in the objects of their experiments, but in the experimenters themselves; it is an observation that lies at the heart of both the work of the comedian and, in Arceneaux's transfigurative practice, the artist as well. JEFFREY KASTNER

[1]


PRESS REVIEWS

From Time Out New York
March 12–18, 2008
WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2008
by Howard Halle

[...] Also first-rate is Edgar Arceneaux's video, The Alchemy of Comedy…Stupid, in which the artist enlists the aid of former In Living Color star David Alan Grier. Grier appears in multiple views as he delivers a stand-up riff on his family and father. The routine, you soon realize, is Arceneaux's vehicle for meditating on the meaning of "post-black." [...]

From Art Observed
March 8, 2008
WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2008

[...] In one of the video caverns off to the side, Edgar Arceneaux has constructed an equally ambitious installation titled "The Alchemy of Comedy...Stupid", using his technological prowess to create an extremely complex video installation comprised of nine channels. Five flat screens, perched on the floor, played five different perspectives of five different comedic performances. A large backdrop of David Alan Grier looking frankly into the camera was offset by a three channel triangular projection to the right. Arceneaux has balanced complex spatial geometry between the "screens," with the space of recorded performative actions happening within the frame. [...]

From Artillery Magazine
May/June 2008
WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2008
by Anuradha Vikram

[...] Edgar Arceneaux's [...]contribution to the show is The Alchemy of Comedy...Stupid, a 9-channel projection environment that features David Alan Grier on a stage framed by chintzy gold curtains. Grier, a TV comedian known for racially-focused humor, both represents and parodies the typical black man in this work, which highlights the most awkward, transitional and uncomfortable moments in a live stand-up performance. The promise of a punchline is never fulfilled, comedy instead disintegrating into discomfort and celebrity into isolation. [...]

[edit] Public Collections

The UCLA Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA www.hammer.ucla.edu

The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA www.cmoa.org

The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, La Jolla, CA www.mcasd.org

The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN www.walkerart.org

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA www.lacma.org

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA www.sfmoma.org

New York Public Library, New York, NY www.nypl.org

Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund, Germany www.museumamostwall.dortmund.de

The Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY www.whitney.org


[edit] Grants and Awards

2007 United States Artists Fellowship [[5]]

2006 William H. Johnson Award [[6]]

2006 ArtPace Residency, San Antonio, TX [[7]]

2005 Joyce Award, Chicago, IL

2005 Creative Capital Grant, New York, NY

[edit] External links

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