Writes Laurel Reuter, Director, North Dakota Museum of Art: "[Arabesque] explodes into dance, the dance of the bucking horse, the bull, the clown, the rodeo rider. This is the resplendent West, but Lucier undermines its glory with loss. Brilliantly, the artist sets her choreography to George Strait's Country Western song, I Can Still Make Cheyenne. The music and the images cascade back over themselves, folding, repositioning, repeating, alive with rapture ... and, again, longing."

Arabesque derives from Lucier's five-channel installation The Plains of Sweet Regret, commissioned by the North Dakota Museum of Art.