Skinning the Mirror #36 Diptych, 2021, silver nitrate, acrylic paint, and glass on canvas, 257.17 by 407.67 by 9.52 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Mirrors have long played a central role in Edgar Arceneaux’s practice. In his recent work, Arceneaux “skins” mirrors: he decouples the reflective metal backing from a mirror’s rigid glass substrate and applies the silvery coating onto canvas. The silver on the painting begins to interact with the air in the room and bonds with organic nitrogen in the atmosphere. The work thus initiates a living process that evolves over time and is contingent on atmospheric conditions.
The artist compares the loose-hung canvases to death shrouds. In his view, the mirrors were once “alive,” serving the purpose for which they had been produced, and are now “dead”: broken, fragmented, torn, skinned, and their chemical viscera placed on view. These complex associations are derived from our historical relationship with mirrors as repositories of the self, reflecting our likenesses back to us. According to the art historian Julian Myers-Szupinska, these works cast us into a “prehistorical, pre-subjective ooze, and leave us gazing at the image that is reflected back at us when the mirror loses its function—when it fails to confirm our wholeness, our normalcy, our place in the world, the cherished images of ourselves.” The physical nature of Arceneaux’s work accordingly calls up many things at once, including death, objecthood, process, and abstraction.
In many of his previous projects, Arceneaux examined historical narratives and present-day truths directly, often by incorporating representational imagery into installations and drawings. Marking a departure, the mirror works are more volatile and ambiguous. The glass shards and disfigurements can be understood as metaphors for the fragmentary nature of self-understanding and the inadequacy of historical narratives.
