If Nihil has succeeded, it’s because it’s finally failed. Over the past year or so, I’ve grown aware that what had begun spontaneously and in earnest was turning into a performance, a kind of window dressing, or, gods forbid, a brand. Now, four years on, it’s apparent the Nihil project must end where it began, on a hot New Mexico summer day in the abandoned Cedarvale School.

Most paintings in the Nihil project are created by referencing drawings made over the span of a day or two along the Nihil route in New Mexico, where we live. This is true, too, of the triptych “The Hermit,” which was made from drawings along the Rio Grande near the village of San Acacia and in the Sandia Wilderness near our own village of Placitas on January 29th and 30th, 2024.

Joshua Hagler’s Nihil II / Nor the Moon in its Water, is the second in an ongoing series of exhibitions informed by imagery inspired by the artist’s visual encounters while traveling in New Mexico as well as childhood memories related to the loss of a younger brother. For this Nihil iteration, Hagler duplicates his drawings and sculptures, and then presents the versions within the two cells of the OJAC’s jail structure. As a result, each becomes a shadow or reflection of the other. Hagler states that “one could think of the installation as two exhibitions—one as the deteriorating memory, or a dampened echo of the other.” He admits that any specific meaning in the work is of less importance than what is experienced during its making and also when it is viewed.

In childhood and since, I’ve feared my own disappearance, and have often endured, throughout my life, a sense of the self disappearing. Somehow, it sometimes feels as if I’ve never existed in the first place, like a ghost trying to remember the life it might once have led. Wasn’t I going somewhere? Wasn’t something supposed to have happened?

“There is a tinge of the pejorative in [the word nothing]… that it would be understood negatively, that one wouldn’t want nothing,” says Joshua Hagler in a short film (included below). A few years ago, the New Mexico-based artist was struck by an idea, or more precisely, a word: nihil. He can’t pinpoint a specific moment or impetus but describes experiencing it flash into his mind and linger there, surfacing again and again until he was prompted to research its meaning.

As exemplified by bizarre events like the Big Bang, there are many wondrous things that may emerge from stark places of nothingness. With paintings born purely from the subconscious, Joshua Hagler illustrates this notion in a current solo show, I Would Not Speak of the Mountain at Nicodim Gallery Los Angeles.

On the surface, Lion shows, if you can find it, a howling coyote, a central mountain lion-human hybrid figure, and parts of a couple other figures in the top right area of the piece, which are leftover vestiges of drawings of my three-year-old daughter who, at the time of the drawings, was busy rolling around on a museum bench. The picture is absurd and makes no sense. This is also the first painting that responds to the newest and the last of the Nihil tenets, Non-Preference, which is still unpublished.

This piece was made on two 80 x 80 in. canvases to fit in an area in a classroom where there was once a blackboard in the abandoned San Antonio Elementary School. San Antonio is the town closest to the Trinity Site where the first atomic bomb was tested.

Among the drawings I made at the Costco located along the Nihil route in Albuquerque, were very quick portraits of the many women operating the free-sample booths. Most of them I drew quickly and discreetly to avoid notice. One employee, in particular, however, gave me permission to draw her portrait.

“The Unknown Collaborator” references sketches I made of a laminated inkjet printout of the facial area of the Shroud of Turin, which I found in a funky thrift store in Socorro, New Mexico and purchased for 25 cents. The source material is absurd because it only meets the Nihil tenet of Non-Mediation on the technicality that I was looking directly at an object found on the Nihil route.

At an abandoned drive-in theater on the Nihil route near Socorro, I discovered a mother red-tail hawk in her nest on the reverse side of the enormous screen. I was able to climb a hill opposite to get up high enough to take some photos and make some drawings. She didn't take kindly to paparazzi. After a couple minutes, she launched out of her nest shrieking with rage. She circled me for several minutes, shrieking again and again. I could feel her raw power under my own skin.

I am still trying to make sense of these four paintings. They’re all 100 x 84 in. and they seem to hint toward a narrative I didn’t plan, which I’ll come back to. Each was made for the gymnasium at the abandoned San Antonio Elementary School, and were made at that size because 84 inches is the diagonal measurement of its largest door.

During the hot, windy spring of 2022, much of New Mexico burned. From our front yard, we watched daily as smoke from the fires in the Jemez Mountains filled the northern sky. Our home itself is located at the foot of the Sandia Mountains, just south of us. Daily, I wondered: If wildfires are happening everywhere else, how long before it happens here?

Links to the nine Tenets of Nihil

“Fratres” is the title I’ve given to a suite of three paintings, though I don’t think of them as a single piece as in a triptych. Neither do they all come from drawings or experiences that are similar or in similar areas of New Mexico. And yet, as I worked on the three on my studio wall, they seemed somehow to belong to the same story, which I suppose is the song “Fratres” composed by Arvo Part.

The installation of work at the abandoned bible school near Fort Sumner, New Mexico is the first in which supports for paintings were built to specific sizes. This is most apparent with the painting “Archaic Brother,” which was made to fit the exterior alcove on the school’s façade.

Stabat Mater receives its title from the eponymous Arvo Pärt musical composition, connoting a theme dating back to the thirteenth century of Mary’s suffering at the crucifixion. The final image, or top layer of my painting, has seemingly little to do with it, except that one figure meets another who lies in a hospital bed. Nothing specific about either figure can be made out clearly.

The title of my painting is taken from Arvo Part’s eponymous musical composition, which itself is borrowed from a 1789 poem by Robert Burns. I began referring to Part’s music, and specifically to his tintinnabuli style, about a year ago because I intuited in it a way forward for developing my own structure or dogma for visual artmaking and for what is still becoming the Nihil concept.

In the five occasions I’ve come here over the past three years, I can find no evidence of anyone else having been here. Half the roof caved in long before I stumbled upon it.