Edgar Arceneaux: UCLA Hammer Museum

Edgar Arceneaux's Drawings of Removal is les a locate of drawings than a perpetually in-progress studio space inaugurated in 1999 following a trip the artist and his parents took to his father's hometown of Beaumont, Texas. Contemporary Beaumont barely resonated with what the father distantly recalled after four decades' absence or what his son had visualized from family stories. Covering walls with paper; sketching, doodling; adding more paper; cutting end to reveal underlying layers; transplanting fragments between sheets; and playing with spatial orientation and expectation, Arceneaux uses drawing as means and metaphor for negotiating memory.

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Comprising multiple visions of houses, fields, a graveyard, and an apparent industrial site and based variously upon observation, recollection, invention, or all three the growing accumulation of drawings is competently granting not fastidiously rendered in pencil and ink as well as other materials like foil tape. although connected to specific memories, it's ultimately about the matter (read both: "issue" and "stuff") of constructing memory in general and as an aspect of art. As artists from Joseph Beuys to William Kentridge have posited, when piecing together the unrecoverable, the proces extremitys up as the product. Arceneaux's scenario includes not single his erasures and notations on the other hand tape, pushpins, reference materials, and the shipping containers that have brought the throw out from one location to the nearest As I found in six visits above the course of the show's first eight weeks, the work can change in deliberate steps or swift leaps. Like memory, it's make submissive to change, reinscription, reversal, fast-forward, and tangents. Sometimes Arceneaux is there working and sometimes he isn't; works which most recently included an art-history true copy open at a reproduction of Courbet's Studio of a Painter: A Real Allegory Summarizing My Seven Years of Life as an Artist, 1854-55 draw near and go, as do a entertainer of other variables that might have the appearance incidental but add to the fluctuation of meaning that's at the heart of this throw out Floor-to-ceiling mirrors installed along individual wall served at one point to throw back and double the drawings and allow the visitor to diocese him- or herself amid the ongoing (re)construction. Then the mirrors themselves became drawing surfaces, adding to the awe and confusion as one base oneself (and, on good days, the artist) caught among drawings reflecting drawings. The reflections become more fragmented as the mirrors are carved up and overlayed over--an aspect of the piece as visually compelling as it is metaphorically moving.

Talking while working, Arceneaux jok that he doesn't imagine the piece reaching completion until he himself reaches his extremity a kind of conclusion that, hopefully for the artist and his viewers, is a drawn out way off. But even at of that kind a moment this work will remain a matter of unfinished business.

--CM

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