Joshua Hagler

"I would not speak of the mountain

Nor the moon in its water

Already paradise

Already the fool"

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 second solo exhibition with Nicodim, the third in his Nihil body of work, and his twenty-first solo exhibition since becoming a full-time artist seventeen years ago.

Nihil began as an open-ended exploration of the unconscious self by way of abandoned architecture throughout swaths of now-unpopulated New Mexico. Within the project, Hagler attempted to summon “the many times and places [that] hover before and behind one another within a single moment or space” in artistic collaborations with the spirits, energies, and relics that inhabit these ghost structures. He would install and exhibit his completed paintings within these spaces, with only the spirits, energies, and relics as audience. Nihil began in tandem with his meditation practice, and he concluded it when the installs began to feel like performance, and the authenticity of the gesture had run its course.

“Already Paradise” is both sincere and ironic as a title. By no means do I think we live in a paradise or have one on the horizon. Whatever we construct and inhabit, however briefly, with large sums of money or whatever, to shut out the pain and suffering of the world is certainly always and only a fool’s paradise. A weird kind of avoidance or repression. I am, in my way, also tapping into the dissociative aspect of the art world, as well as my own life choice to live in a nowhere desert town at the base of a mountain.

The other bit of irony is the word “already.” Like we ain’t been doing shit a long time.

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 landscape makes one aware of consciousness in a deeper way. It has its own intelligence. That paradox of loneliness and interconnectedness is experienced as relief from suffering. Attentiveness itself is a kind of paradise. It’s always available. It doesn’t extinguish what we usually experience as a problem—sadness, loneliness, anger, loss, etcetera—it simply gives them a place to land and makes them workable.

In any case, I thought of the phrase as a kind of concluding gesture. Sort of gentle on one hand, a little brazen on the other.

Nihil was an accidental work of self-help. It was and is art as therapy. Yet, in all my tired-ass sentimental dadness, I can’t figure out what else it should even be for. Nihil, if you don’t mind my saying, was fucking brilliant. I put my trauma at the center of it, made it the anima mundi of my ritual, the viewing lens through which all observation was made, exteriorized my own unconscious projections, accidentally invented numerous new archetypes by which numerous valences could be transferred and exchanged, and by doing so, gave closure to a ghost which had haunted me all my life. And I did it all by accident. The sheer, unyielding force of the unconscious brings me to the edge of my sanity. And yet, 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?

—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, forthcoming); The Ballad of the Children of the Czar, Galeria Nicodim, Bucharest (2024); Overserved, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York (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).