JOSHUA HALGER

The show’s title, drawn from the poem “Metamorphosis” by Louise Glück, is evocative of this shift. For Hagler, the verse speaks to life during the global pandemic, the birth of his now ten-month-old daughter and his relocation to rural New Mexico. Relinquishing socio-political messaging in favour of a more intimate sense of being attentive to his immediate world, he sets an important parameter for the exhibition: to respond only to the visual information he encounters in his day-to-day life.

The exhibition’s curator, David Anfam notes:

”Joshua Hagler’s recent works mark an important move forward into mysterious, more intuitive realms. Memory plays a key role, but so does Hagler’s visceral contact with surrounding reality. This includes the deserted buildings and fire-scorched landscape of southwestern New Mexico where he lives – as well as the birth of his daughter not long ago. Distant echoes from the Old Masters mingle with brooding chromatic fields to create a blurred yet vivid cartography of consciousness. At once dream-like and intensely physical, Hagler’s painterly meditations on life, love, death and landscape could not be more timely as visual poems addressing existence in today’s troubled world.”

Images that find their way into Hagler’s drawings and paintings include the natural landscape of southern New Mexico, sometimes damaged by fires or littered with abandoned settlements.

Other times, drawings of his infant daughter or his wife nursing late at night become the basis for a painting. While still at others, he draws the cheap reproductions of the Fourteen Stations of the Cross adorning the walls of an old nearby mission church, or portraits from the obituary page caught in a mesquite tree in the field behind his studio. While all these images are important to the artist in their own right, his interest is not so much in the usual cultural or historical meanings or in reproducing or emulating the subject’s likeness. Rather, he understands drawing as a contemplative method for simply being with the subject. In this way his drawings are done in a blind contour manner, and once committed to colour on the canvas, are often barely recognisable, if at all.

Among the factors that contribute to Hagler’s recent shift is his emphasis away from narrative and recognisable imagery and toward materiality and raw presence. Substrates range from canvas, linen, burlap, bedsheets, and polyester film, often combined in a single work. Other paintings occur on found objects left in abandoned properties, on objects such as road signs, car wreckage, and flattened tin pails perforated with bullet holes.