Joshua Hagler has worked for over a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area until recently relocating to Los Angeles. Known mainly for his large-scale semi-figurative canvases, the work has followed a natural evolution in the artists's personal exploration and anxiety around religious thought and its history. Since 2006, he has exhibited his paintings and multi-media installations through North America and Europe, including several solo exhibitions.
Working for over a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area, Joshua Hagler recently relocated to Los Angeles. The work has followed a natural evolution in the artists’s personal exploration and anxiety around religious thought and its history. Currently, research and work looks toward Westward Expansion in 19th-century United States as a means of exhuming a kind of poetry of amnesia and redemptive yearning in colonists, settlers and their descendents.
Since 2006, he has exhibited his paintings, videos, and multi-media installations throughout North America and Europe, including several solo exhibitions. “Between Winds,” submitted here for the Transart Triennale is currently a part of Hagler’s traveling solo exhibition “The Adopted” first appearing at La Sierra University in Riverside, California and now at JAUS Gallery in Los Angeles.
In 2013, Hagler traveled for three months with collaborator Maja Ruznic through Eastern and Western Europe and the Middle East making art with war refugees, orphans, and the terminally ill while creating the art book DRIFT. 2013 also included guest lecturing at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, and solo show The Unsurrendered at the university gallery.
In 2012, his animated video projection “The Evangelists” was based on interviews with four middle-aged men dealing with psychological trauma and included Hagler’s former neighbor who burned down their mutual San Francisco apartment building in 2007. The piece was later selected to exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and the Royal Institute in Adelaide, Australia.
Maja Ruznic was born in Bosnia & Hercegovina in 1983 and came to the United States as a refugee in 1992. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Ruznic studied Psychology and Art at UC Berkeley and received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2009. She has exhibited in Japan, Turkey, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, Austria, France, Puerto Rico, Texas, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Her painting "The Mother of All Evil" was featured on the cover of New American Paintings in 2011 (Pacific Coast Section, Number 97). Ruznic’s work is included in the Jiminez-Colon Collection (Puerto Rico) and she recently received the Dave Bown (9th semiannual competition) Award of Excellence. She was a featured artist in JUXTAPOZ art magazine in the Septemeber 2014 issue. Last year, Ruznic’s first international solo show, “Yellow Throat Ribs” at Galerie d’Ys was a great success. Congruent with the solo show, Ruznic was also represented by Candyland Gallery at the Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm, Sweden through which the Public Arts Commission acquired two of Ruznic’s paintings. In 2016, Ruznic will have a solo exhibition at Jack Fischer Gallery titled “Soil As Witness”, which will consists of large oil paintings, small works on paper as well as sculptures. She will also be a part of “Werewolf” a group exhibition at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angles, as well as “Between Worlds”, a group exhibition at Arc Gallery in San Francisco, in which all the artists were refugees or deal with the themes of immigration and Diaspora in their work. www.artistdecoded.com
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