Edgar Arceneaux

THE AGITATION OF EXPANSION

Opening Friday, January 19, 2007
Exhibition January 20 - March 3, 2007
Opening Hours Tue - Sat 11am - 6pm

Edgar Arceneaux (*1972, Los Angeles) continuously works on the themes of forms manifested in language and how knowledge is derived from them. In his drawings, objects and film installations, personal as well as collective memories, both consciously and unconsciously, branch out and cross over through a combination of elements which often appear conflictive.

Mitchell Feigenbaum, a pioneer of chaos theory, was taking a walk in the park, when he observed a couple having a picnic. He noticed that as he got further away from them, that the couple became smaller, until they reached what he characterized as a “threshold of incomprehensibility” where the sounds and the movements of their bodies had moved out of phase, becoming unpredictable. He asked himself “ When things get smaller, why do they become senseless? What is the link between shrinking and the loss of meaning?” A seemingly trivial question, which beyond the surface has huge implications about the formation of space and our understanding of the objects that occupy it. He was looking for a new language that produced a number of new pictures that described better then it explained. That there are forms in nature, not just visible forms, but shapes embedded within the fabric of motion. Patterns and shapes that linear formula can only insufficiently reveal.

For Edgar Arceneaux, these forms are revealed through repetition, the accumulation of experiences, and often even in the poetic redundancies of language itself. For this show, he supports this assertion with a collection of material strategies realized through objects, drawings, film, and slide projections. The Agitation of Expansion examines the significance of the inquiry into scale and meaning and uses structuralist film maker, Morgan Fishers, 1976 Peugeot 504 as an anchor point.