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About Josh: Joshua Hagler lived and worked in San Francisco and then Los Angeles for fifteen years before moving to rural New Mexico in late 2017 as a grant recipient of the year-long Roswell Artist in Residence Program. He 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. Having not attended an art school or received an MFA, Hagler refers to himself as a working class artist. Not a stranger to class bias in the art world, self-directed research and travel has underpinned Hagler’s career and is essential to how the artist integrates creative influences with his life experience.
While most of Hagler’s early work responded directly to a difficult past within a variety of religious groups and their unspoken implications for the artist and his family, the later work has sought to understand religion in a deeper way. To Hagler’s mind, one finds the seeds of religion in every facet of culture, even, and, perhaps especially, among the so-called secular realms. Religion, for Hagler, is not approached in the pejorative but in a state of acceptance that perhaps it’s through the religious structures inherent in our shared languages and cultures that we access what makes us most human, for better and for worse.
Currently, he is hard at work in the studio preparing for his first U.K. solo exhibition with Unit London. In “Chimera,” Hagler presents a body of new paintings that attempt to dig beneath various forms of loud political language, including censorship, for clues on how the ubiquity of groupthink informs populist world views on both ends of the spectrum. The artist, in practice, hopes to work into the “noise” to exhume something Other in the physical manner in which the work is made.
2018 saw two museum shows at the Brand Library and Art Center in Los Angeles and the Roswell Museum and Art Center in New Mexico entitled “The River Lethe” and “Love Letters to the Poorly Regarded” respectively. He has exhibited paintings, sculpture, video, and animation in galleries and museums in North and South America, Europe, and Australia, including a long list of solo exhibitions. Reviews and features about the work have appeared in a variety of publications and media outlets in the U.S. and Europe.
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About Daniel: Daniel Martin (1982) lives and works in Leiden, the Netherlands. In his current work he searches for the transmutational properties of matter. The portraits and sculptures do not have a definite form and posses different realities on how they can be perceived. In order to come to new forms Daniel cuts up paintings, finds things on the street and uses creations made by others. The loose elements from these endeavors are used as disjointed brushstrokes that are reassembled in coherent shapes again, creating an object which holds no truth in shape.
His work has been published and exhibited nationally and internationally. Exhibitions include, the national museum of revolution, Cuba; Duo Phillip Akkerman, Sis Josip Gallery, Den Haag; Havana Biënnale (collaboration with Karang (Karina Alonso); Forma prima, El pez soluble Gallery, Mexico; Bloom, Booth Gallery, New York.
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About Mia: Mia Bergeron is a contemporary female oil painter focused on the dualism of everyday scenes. Rooted in her upbringing in New York City with continuous exposure to modern art at a young age, her paintings also reveal her choice to study classical painting in Florence, Italy. Throughout her work, influences of both contemporary and historical ideas can be seen, whether rooted by her choice of subjects or the exploratory nature of the tools she employs. Her work seeks to show the nebulous aspects of being human, often choosing to pose a question rather than pursue an answer.
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About Christian: Christian Rex van Minnen was born in Providence, RI in 1980 and received his BA from Regis University, Denver in 2002. He has exhibited throughout the US and internationally and was recently awarded an Artist-in-Residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, CO (Fall, 2017).
Recent exhibitions include con-figuration, a group exhibit at Postmasters, NY, Juxtapoz x Superflat, co-curated by Takashi Murakami & Evan Pricco at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada and Enantiodromia a solo show at Gallery Poulsen in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Public Collections include: Denver Art Museum, Djurhuus Collection, The Christine & Andy Hall Collection, Colección Solo, and the Richard B. Sachs Collection. van Minnen currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
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