Warning: Art in Progress

“Please do not clean this room!!! Or throw anything away.
Thank you.”

Scrawled on a small scrap of paper and taped onto a wall of his
exhibition room, 31-year-old Edgar Arceneaux’s note to the
Hammer Museum’s cleaning crew shows that he is cautious about
how others perceive his space, which will serve as his exhibit and
personal studio until the end of February.

“At the beginning of this project, the museum workers
cleaned up the things I left sitting out in the exhibit
space,” explained Arceneaux. “What they didn’t
know was my intention for everything in the studio (to be a part
of) the exhibit itself. It is not meant to be cleaned in the
traditional sense.”

“Non-traditional” may be the best way to describe
Arceneaux’s exhibit, “Drawings of Removal,” now
on display at the Hammer.

Set up in a room that looks like a makeshift studio with casual
ambiance, “Drawings of Removal” refers to everything
from the layers of giant white papers with drawings against the
wall, a cylinder box that carries those drawings from one exhibit
to another, a canvas chair, some boxes of drawing materials to the
bar of chocolate with a missing chunk laying on top of a pencil
box.

“It’s an open space where I can think through my
ideas and be open to anything. It is not a performance for an
audience, but a casual interaction that is not scripted,”
said Arceneaux. “You can call it random.”

Arceneaux in fact envisioned his ideal studio/exhibit to be
situated in a hallway, where visitors can walk by freely without
feeling obligated to stop, but could do so if desired. However, he
expresses no complaints about his exhibit being held in an enclosed
room. “The room is connected to the museum’s lobby, so
I guess it’s the same.”

Originally inspired by a trip to his father’s hometown of
Beaumont, Texas, in 1998, Arceneaux sees the exhibit as a model of
human memory and the way it is constantly created, erased,
misplaced and reinvented. Pieces of drawings are being created, cut
out, and placed somewhere else in the room or blacked out
completely throughout each exhibition. Using those cumulative
processes, Arceneaux will stay in the studio space for five to
seven days at a time within a three-month period, interacting with
visitors while recreating his working space.

According to Aimee Chang, the curatorial assistant at the
Hammer, visitors of this exhibit are allowed to touch the drawings,
look through the art materials, sit down to chat with the working
artist, and interact with everything else in the exhibit space.

“I want to break down the traditional distance between the
art production and its audience,” said Arceneaux. “I
say hello to my visitors and get inspirations from the
conversations I have with them.”

One of those inspirations led to a new addition to this version
of the exhibit: mirrors that cover an entire side of the walls.

“The mirrors can be the first thing you see as you walk
into the room, and they create an illusion of reality,” said
Arceneaux. “Just like memory, the mirrors’ images are
never real. It’s all subjective illusion.”

Arceneaux reveals that his next move may be to create a
seven-foot-long ruler that attaches to one of the walls in the
exhibit space. “This is still a work in progress,” said
Arceneaux. “Like memory, the images here will always be
changing, and there will always be surprises.”

“Drawings of Removal” runs

to Feb. 29, 2004. For more

information, visit www.hammer.ucla.edu.