Archive Project 11: Edgar Arceneaux

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The Project Series
Project 11: Edgar Arceneaux

For the last several years, Los Angeles-based artist Edgar Arceneaux has worked with drawing and language. He uses language in his drawings to inscribe a territory or construct a narrative situation or voice that is highly inflected and subjective. In this exhibition, “The Trivium: A Socratic Model for Understanding,” the artist presened a new drawing installation that loosely related language and logic to improvisational jazz, freestyle hip hop, and Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. With this work, Arceneaux furthered his explorations into language and the construction of meaning.

The primary subject of Arceneaux’s work, language, is also the tool with which he explores a wide range of discourses, from universal humanism to popular culture. While examining the relationships between American and European mythologies, he also investigates issues of class and social structure. By linking Dante’s Inferno and Socratic philosophy with the music of Thelonious Monk, Pharoahe Monch, and Pharoah Sanders, Arceneaux juxtaposes “high” culture—the intellectual histories of Western society—with pop culture—hip hop and jazz music. In “The Trivium,” he layered imagery and notations referring to these sources, thus complementing the multiple layers of meanings inherent in the subject matter. By searching for these connections between things, he seeks to shed light on our culture and history.

Arceneaux’s installations emphasize the tools and processes employed in drawing. In the installations, he combines graphite on vellum drawings with objects from the artist’s studio and everyday environment. By including such items as pencils, tape, scissors, mailing tubes, etc., Arceneaux challenges assumptions about the way we view art. This blurring of boundaries connects his work art historically to conceptualism’s traditions of combining text, image, and process-oriented documentation of the artist’s activities. At once intellectual and personal, minimal and elaborate, Arceneaux’s installation explores identity, history, and popular culture.

Edgar Arceneaux’s exhibition was the eleventh in the Museum’s Project Series, an ongoing program of small exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts. During each exhibition, participating artists worked with faculty and students in relevant disciplines.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator