Wallworks
photo: Ira Schrank, Sixth Street Studio
22 LOST SIGNS OF THE ZODIAC: THREE VARIATIONS OF SEVEN
(2009)
Edgar Arceneaux
b. 1972, Los Angeles. Lives and works in Los Angeles.
66 drawings on paper, graphite, gesso, enamel, dirt, and wooden table
25 x 48.3 x 43 feet
Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
Edgar Arceneaux seems to be intrigued by subjects of collision and synchronicity where the source of an image is implied but then obscured through draftsmanship and graphic techniques. He often erases, redraws, or cuts up imagery such as scenes of car crashes and urban landscapes that fuse popular icons and cosmological causalities that then become elements ripe for reassembly, resulting in the reordering of our relationship to memory with the blur replacing specificity and emotion trumping rationality.
Arceneaux’s 22 Lost Signs of the Zodiac: Three Variations of Seven rescues twenty-two constellations from their outcast position, bringing them back into the “fold” of the astrological “order” to which they belong. As a popular tool for the examination of human life, whether viewed as a system of fate or as an aid for making the right choice by a neutral guide, astrology bends astronomy to human needs and desires. It reveals potentialities and possibilities through a reading of the intersection of birth and the stars. Impermanence is implied in philosophies of fate, and veracity of interpretation is unstable, as it is dependent on the wisdom and frailties of individuals. So what happens to our belief in this system when we learn that Ptolemy (90–168 CE), the Greek astronomer who rationalized the universe from a geocentric view excised signs associated with the snake, and its association with the power of femininity. The idea of a “lost sign” corresponds to the lost tribes in the Bible, and in both cases those who are left out are not counted within the system. Arceneaux presents each of the signs that were removed on colored paper, each in three versions, to provide the audience with a small set of interpretive options for each of the missing constellations. The “lost signs” are organized into a color grid where there is an intersection between the chromatic spectrum and the tonal range, introducing gradation, maybe the gray area of interpretation, as well as colors as in the spirit of a mood, to the installation. The rolls of paper are also symbolic of the bodies of the “lost tribes” and are offered up to be unfurled by the viewer, who is invited to open up the “body” to view its interior. The face of the drawing reveals an image of the constellation within a galaxy, therefore conflating the inside of the body with the firmament, a suggestion of the metaphysical as much as the spiritual. In handling the drawings on paper, made of the highly transferable materials of graphite and dirt, the viewer’s presence with the object will be traced through a mark or a dent in the paper, or some other form of interference with the surface, so that with each viewing the image will deteriorate toward a state of ultimate celestial illegibility.
Arceneaux has had solo exhibitions at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Galerie Kamm, Berlin. Group exhibitions include Social Strategies: Redefining Social Realism, University Art Museum, Santa Barbara; Urban Aesthetics, African American Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and One Planet Under a Groove, Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York.
— Betti-Sue Hertz