Joshua Hagler
Joshua Hagler
The Hermit, 2024
mixed media on linen
triptych, each panel 120 x 80 in
305 x 203 cm
Nihil III / Already Paradise is the conclusion of Joshua Hagler’s Nihil project. It has encompassed the last four years of his life, beginning in a global pandemic two months before the birth of his daughter and one American presidential election ago. It is his first solo exhibition in New York, second solo exhibition with Nicodim, the third in his Nihil body of work, and his twenty-first solo exhibition over the past seventeen years.
Nihil began with nine tenets and a tree-shaped route through New Mexico, constituting a guiding structure for exploring the unconscious self by way of abandoned architecture and the natural landscape of the sparsely populated state where he lives. Within the project, Hagler looked for “the many times and places hovering before and behind one another within a single moment or space.” Like the crumbling walls of abandoned schools and churches, age-old erosion and volcanic sediment, and more recent debris of wildfire and flooding, the paintings mine both an internal and external sense of memory, as much revealed as lost in the process.
Already Paradise, Hagler explains, is an ironic title sincerely felt.
“In spite of our world’s innumerable cycle of horrors, I do truly, actually believe that another world is alive and accessible within each of us. The contradiction of what I’m calling the ironic and the sincere is found everywhere within this project. Wandering the vast New Mexico landscape makes one aware of consciousness in a deeper way. It has its own intelligence and seems to welcome us into it should we choose. That paradox of presence and absence is experienced as a welcoming indifference. Attentiveness itself is its own paradise.
“Nihil was an accidental work of self-help, which you’re not allowed to say. Yet, in all my sentimental tired-ass dadness, I can’t figure out what else art should even be for. Somehow, in Nihil, I put my loneliness and trauma at the center and made it the anima mundi of an ongoing ritual, or pilgrimage if you like. I became more aware of my own unconscious projections, as numerous new archetypes continued to pop up within my direct encounters, whether in wildlife, in the strangers I met, or in the land itself. I became more sensitive to the numerous valences between myself and that which I encountered, so that, slowly, a transformation in the work and in life occurred. Nihil gave meaning and a sense of place to a ghost which had haunted me since childhood, that of my youngest brother and the implications of that loss within my family from then until now. Still, even now, as I feel the truth of this all over my body, it’s one of those things I could hold up to someone and hear them say, ‘What? That old thing?’ And yet?
“And yet.”
—Joshua Hagler
Joshua Hagler (b. 1979, Mountain Home AFB, Idaho) is a first-generation graduate with a graphic design degree from The University of Arizona. A 2018 grant recipient of the Roswell Artist in Residence Program, Hagler has since made New Mexico his permanent home. Currently, he lives with his wife and daughter in the high desert village of Placitas at the foot of the Sandia Mountains.
In recent years, his practice has been guided by an approach he calls Nihil, a set of nine self-imposed principles that have grown out of solitary excursions throughout the state. These principles determine all aspects of the work from its imagery and process, to the media and objects comprising it. Concept and meaning, as such, naturally unfold out of synchronistic experiences occurring over time.
Exhibitions include: Nihil III / Already Paradise, Nicodim, New York (2024, solo); The Ballad of the Children of the Czar, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2024); Overserved, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (2024); Memory, Maruani Mercier, Brussels (2024); Focus: Joshua Hagler, Cris Worley Fine Arts, Dallas (2024, solo); Nihil II / Nor The Moon in its Water, Old Jail Art Center, Albany (2024, solo); Arcadia and Elsewhere, James Cohan, New York (2024); Nihil I / I Would Not Speak of the Mountain, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2023, solo); The Descendants, K11 Musea, Hong Kong (2023); MATERNITY LEAVE: NONE OF WOMEN BORN, Nicodim in collaboration with the Green Family Foundation, Dallas (2023); Joshua Hagler, Devin B. Johnson, Nicola Samorì, Hugo Wilson, Nicodim, Los Angeles (2023); DISEMBODIED, Nicodim, New York (2023); Unmatter, Secci, Milan (2022); The Living Circle Us, Unit, London (2021, solo); Witness or Pretend, Bode Projects, Berlin (2021); Drawing in the Dark, Cris Worley Fine Arts, Dallas (2021, solo); Figure as Form, Hollis Taggart Gallery, New York (2020); Love Letters to the Poorly Regarded, Roswell Museum and Art Center (2018, solo), and The River Lethe, Brand Library and Art Center, Los Angeles (2018, solo).