Softground aquatint etching with roulette
Paper size 36″ x 44″
Edition of 30
Published by Paulson Press
$1500

In 1968, Arceneaux combines the infamous image of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. with a faint drawing of the USS Enterprise from the popular television show Star Trek. On April 4, 1968, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, King’s acquaintances exited their motel room to find the assassinated body of King. The appearance of the enterprise in this re-representation humorously alludes to the disparate and sometimes conflicting accounts of King’s death. Furthermore, the pairing has a leveling effect – as if the coexistence is somehow natural, as detached signifiers of popular culture sutured by the date, 1968. The juxtaposition generates a proliferating set of possible causalities in the ingrained narrative structure of science fiction and political history.

Edgar Arceneaux currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the California Institute for the Arts in Valencia, California in 2001. His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Notable solo exhibitions include “Drawings of Removal” at the UCLA Hammer Museum in 2003, and the collaborative project with Charles Gaines entitled “Snake River” at the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theatre in 2006.