FOCUS: Joshua Hagler is a mini solo exhibition of large and small works on view at Cris Worley Fine Arts in conjunction with Hagler’s offsite solo exhibition entitled, Nihil II: Nor the Moon in Its Water, at the Old Jail Art Center in Albany, Texas, opening February 17th. This exhibition marks the second in a series of the Nihil project. In the artist’s words, “Nihil is the name I’ve given to having nothing left to say. This might sound, from a certain distance, like loss or failure. In practice, saying nothing is the work’s liberation, its best hope for authenticity. Nihil is the name I give to the trick I play on myself that gets me out of the way of the work. Sometimes Nihil refers to my broader contemplative practice, of which painting is just a part. Sometimes it refers to its nine tenets: arbitrary rules for an arbitrary structure, resulting in work specific and accurate unto itself, impossible to replicate.”

Works in both exhibitions are inspired by the artist’s journey through the “Nihil route” — the limitless landscape throughout his home state of New Mexico.

Joshua Hagler lived and worked in San Francisco and then Los Angeles for fifteen years before moving to Roswell, New Mexico in 2018 as a grant recipient of the year-long Roswell Artist in Residence Program.​ ​He and his wife, contemporary artist Maja Ruznic, now live and work in New Mexico with their daughter. Hagler was born at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho in 1979 and is a first-generation college graduate with a visual communications degree from the University of Arizona in Tucson.