An Interview with Edgar Arceneaux

The creation of Edgar Arceneaux’s Skinning the Mirror #59 required a lot of space. At eleven meters, the painting spans the wall of one of the largest open galleries in the museum. Arceneaux and his team pressed mirrors against a prepared canvas and then methodically ripped the surface back.  The silvery reflective surface on the mirrors stuck to the canvas unevenly, creating intricate patterns of fracture lines. Over the course of the show, the mirrors have tarnished and changed, driven in part by the room’s relative humidity–a condition that, in turn, is affected by the presence of visitors. Arceneaux spoke with TB23 editor William Smith about the intimacy of the work and its place in his practice.

William Smith: Your work for the Taipei Biennial 2023 is monumental. How were you thinking about scale throughout the process of making this piece? 

Edgar Arceneaux: If someone were to stand in front of the work, I wanted their full vision to be enveloped— their peripheral vision as well as the central point of focus. If you were in front of it, you could get pulled inside the picture. It’s one of these pictures that you need to sit with for a little while for it to start to work on you. As soon as the eye focuses on one area, then other little details—cracks and fissures and bits of color—start to come through from beneath the surface of the skin. Having it be that big means you can stay in that space a little bit longer; it wraps around you, allowing you to kind of slip off into thought. 

The scale is also partially an homage to my mom’s interior decorating. When I was a kid, in both the living room and in the dining room, the walls were covered from ceiling to floor with mirrors. This was the ’70s; we used to have white shag carpets in the house. There were smoked mirrors in the dining room. And in the living room it was a whole wall of mirrors. I think it probably gave me some real self-confidence issues growing up: you shouldn’t stare at your reflection for that long.

WS: I saw part of the process of creating the work’s complex surface: you pressed painted canvas onto mirrors and then pulled off the reflective surfaces in patches. What meaning does this intense, highly physical process hold for you?

EA: The surfaces look the way they do because of cohesion and friction. When the paint dries to the silver on the mirrors, it has to have some cohesion so that it can take the silver off, but it never does it uniformly. It all depends on the density of the paint, how it dries, the air bubbles in there. Once the paint is pulled off, it starts to rip.

The ripping part of it became meaningful as I was taking care of my mom, nursing her at the end of her life when she had dementia. At a certain point having to bathe your parent; you become completely confronted by your own creation, the place where you came from. The wrinkles that were in her stomach were really beautiful but also a little bit haunting at the same time. 

When someone gets sick with dementia, they stop eating and drinking and the muscle starts to separate itself from the bone. The skin has a kind of sagginess, and the body starts to shrink. I was trying to make my paintings entirely materially driven. I was making notes about process and material variations, trying to stay in that abstract space. But it slowly started to merge into the abject part of the body, but also the abstraction of death. These two things started to entangle to my own dismay. Now it’s been a couple of years after my mom’s passed and I feel more comfortable saying that the work is most certainly inspired by this transition and the way my mom started to lose control of her body and mind. 

For smaller paintings in the “Skinning the Mirror” series, I paint on the glass with my bare fingers. When you have dementia or Alzheimer’s, everything becomes super focused. If you see a white spot on your wall, then your whole reality becomes that white spot. Sometimes I would catch my mom just be rubbing her hand on a piece of cloth or a blanket. There was something about that sensation of the cloth on her fingers. It was everything. She could do that for 30 minutes. I started to incorporate that state in the way I was applying paint to the mirrors, but the mirrors are also broken. I could really cut myself, and sometimes did. There’s a real delicateness you need to have as you’re pushing these bits of broken glass and massaging the paint on the inside. It feels to me right now that the work requires that level of directness. 

WS: A number of pieces in this biennial have to do with caretaking. Do you see your role as an artist and a caretaker merging in some way? 

EA: As a parent, you understand the bookends of life. When you’re nurturing a person before they can walk, they’re completely dependent on your love just to be able to live. It’s not the same when you’re dealing with a parent. There’s a different kind of affection and, depending on your relationship with your parent, there could be some antipathy towards having to take care of them. Part of it is the disruption between their role and yours. 

I distinctly remember the moment when I realized that things have changed. I found myself undressing my mom and walking her into the shower and just trying to wash her with her clothes on and quickly realizing that I had to undress her while holding her so she didn’t fall. That negotiation was similar to, but not the same, as when my kid was six months old, and I figured out I could bring her in the shower because it was easier to bathe her. But they’re super slippery and you don’t want them to fall. These two realities lived side-by-side, along with another realization that this experience may be a mirror of my own future. If you’re lucky there’s a loved one who wants to be there with you. 

WS: You’re based in Los Angeles and have made other works in the “Skinning the Mirror” series there and elsewhere. What was it like creating this one in Taipei? 

EA: I was excited to pitch this work to be in the Taipei Biennial because I learned that once the silver is exposed, it absorbs nitrogen and sulfur–the other parts of the atmosphere that we don’t breathe. The things it does absorb are organic, which means it is sort of gathering bits of DNA. I’m doing these pieces in different parts of the world so I can compare how they tarnish and change over time. I made a few small ones that I’m leaving behind in different parts of Taipei, and I’m taking one home so I can compare it to whatever is produced here. It’s part of a big experiment for me: how much time does it take for the work to change? How is it affected by humidity and temperature?

WS: How did you have to modify your working process here?

EA: I couldn’t paint with my hands here because the work was so large—I would still be there working on my hands and knees. Instead, I used traditional Taiwanese brooms: handmade brooms that made some of the most beautiful marks. I took those, chopped the handles off, and I’m taking them all back. 

WS: Could you talk about how the mirrors themselves differ in Taiwan? 

EA: For environmental reasons, which I totally understand, they have reduced the amount of silver in mirrors. At first, we didn’t understand why the silver wouldn’t come off. Judy Chu, my assistant, and I tried different techniques for almost two months via Zoom. Once I got here, I bought every chemical I could think of to make this stuff come off. And then it became clear to me that the reflective surface was bonded on some fundamental level. We had to go all the way back to the manufacturing process. 

We were able to convince one of the producers of the mirrors here to let us into his shop. The night we were there, we started experimenting together. To make a mirror you start by cleaning the glass really well. The first layer you put on is called the tin coat, which is basically an invisible super clear layer of tin. Then you put the silver on top, which mixes with the tin, and within a few minutes you’ll get a reflective surface. The producer here was just stopping with that first coat. We asked him to put on two coats. And then three. And then we just experimented with the different paints and the different coats. 

WS: So you had custom-made mirrors.

EA: They’re all custom made. The guy seemed to be really into it because we allowed him to break all of his rules of what makes a sellable mirror. They could be scratch—great. If they chip a corner—that’s fine. He had never really watched a mirror once the paint was stripped off the back how long it took to tarnish, because he didn’t value that experience. When we started playing together he was just letting us do whatever the fuck we wanted. I invited him to the opening. 

WS: You’ve used mirrors and fragments of mirrors in your practice in the past. What’s different about the “Skinning the Mirror” series and what the mirror represents or does? 

EA: I started working with mirrors years ago because they’re not a very cooperative material and they really trouble the gaze. If you try to look at it, it looks back at you, and I like the idea that it shifts and it changes wherever you are. You’re standing to the left of it as someone’s standing to the right, you’ll see each other through a parallax view. But in the past I was dissatisfied with the inflexibility of the glass part of it. It wasn’t until 2012, when I was working on another project, that I accidentally peeled off some of the silver on a mirror—it was just a little tiny quarter-sized piece. I took some notes. I worked on another series of paintings. I stuck that silver piece on the wall and didn’t look at it again for a decade. 

WS: How do you see the relationship between your abstract work and the videos and dramatic works you’ve also created?  

EA: In all of my projects, I would typically take some historical event and merge it with a material process. I would also have some personal relationship to the event as well. Those three points would always be there, but that meant I always oriented the material process in service of the issue. If you take that approach for twenty years, at a certain point you’ve answered most of the questions that you think are worth answering. 

What if I just focused on the process-based exploration?  What if every time a story started to emerge, I pushed it away and stayed focused on the materials? At the time, my mom was slowly getting sicker, then lockdown happened. I was also going through a divorce. Relationships that were so long and deep that were becoming dislodged. Focusing on the abstraction allowed me to tell different kinds of stories. 

My play Boney Manilli is a story centered around two brothers who are both writing plays that they want to show their mom, who has dementia, before she forgets who they are. One brother, named Edgar, is writing a story about the pop group Milli Vanilli because he wants to explore how these boys were exploited by Frank Farian, a shadowy German music engineer. The other brother, Bro Bro, is writing a story that is a revolutionary retelling of the Song of the South, the Uncle Remus adapted by Joel Chandler Harris that Disney retold. 

The two boys have similar motivations: they both want to tell a restorative justice story. But Edgar starts to manipulate his mother: he turns her into a puppet in a way that Frank Farian did to Rob and Fab of Milli Vanilli. The part of us that can be a caretaker can also slip into a darker part of our psyche. He really starts to treat her really badly.  As he struggles with his play and raising money for it, Edgar realizes that the system we exist in is not egalitarian and is not based on the quality of what you do, but often your relationships to power. He also has the fear of losing the most important person in his life. Yet these two profound feelings don’t result in Edgar becoming more empathetic, but rather more maniacal and controlling. It's pretty dark. But the play is a comedy as well! People laugh, people cry.

WS: Did you develop the “Skinning the Mirror” series in parallel with this play?

EA: My storyboards were on the wall at the same time I was making the paintings. I would go back-and-forth. I worked on Boney Manilli for five-and-a-half years because I couldn’t figure out how to tell it. I had written thirty versions of this story, and each of the four times I had staged it, it was radically different. I was going a little bit crazy: why couldn’t I figure out how to tell this? I thought, if I can’t figure out how to tell the story through writing, why not start making paintings about it? I started to work in the figurative tradition I was trained in, but I found it completely dissatisfating.  So I thought, what if I took one little thing and I exploded that? Maybe that would be a counter-intuitive way to some deeper understanding of what Boney Manilli is about. “Skinning the Mirror” started as a way of writing Boney Manilli.