Reflections.. Reg Hager

 

Los Angeles, 1964. Attended Cal Arts Chouinard Art school. Study Art history,
ceramics, drawing, anthropology and design theory avoiding the painting program
which seemed to structured and opinionated for me. I painted in my own studio
playing with ideas of reduced geometries, wave rhythms and irrational figures
in oils or acrylics on canvas and Plexiglas.
My friends and I do the galleries, bars, practice the I-CHING and meet some
Some fine people in the L.A. art community. I develop an interest in astronomy
that borders on the obsessive. A crisis is on the horizon. Where is the spiritual/
emotional content in painting? Build a telescope and move to San Diego.

San Diego, 1967.  Rent a large basement in an old hotel. Huge, dark kitchen
perfect for assembling and combining optical elements of a telescope, cameras
and projectors. We make weekly excursions to Mount Palomar observe and
photograph the planets and any strange phenomena that catch our attention.
These are then developed and projected in the basement studio. I am on the
look out for anything through which to pump light; insects, dyes, thin sections
of rocks and minerals, discarded plastic consumer wrapping,  photo slides of  
exotic animals and strangers. My friends and I gaze in a stupor as this miasma of
imagery layer and shift through the spaces and over the walls like the work  
from a crazed projectionist showing all of her films simultaneously.

La Jolla, 1968. Organize image and projection systems together with several
colleges  forming the light show company `Mirkwood´ which preformed at
rock concerts in southern California.

Del Mar, CA. 1970. Returning to individual work I attempt, through film, to
combine and resolve the disparate themes that fascinate me: Patterning, growth
and variation in form, the immense and impersonal drift of the macro cosmos
with its mortal expression in human movement. Where is a personal code to the
dance of Shiva? This period results in a chimera of short hypnogogic films,
mixed media performance pieces and the production of hallucinatory effects for
a feature film.

Leucadia, CA. 1976. Make contact with NASA and Land Stat requesting imagery
of planetary surfaces. Think of the earth as an alien planet with vulnerable ecology.
The biosphere appears as dense abstraction at this scale. Here I rediscover a sense of content and an opening for painting. Begin a series of canvases inspired by the satellite
imagery over the Earth. These are interpretations giving free play to painterly solutions
while maintaining close attention to boundary and internal proportions. This series named  `Earthscapes´ extends through 1981 to include eight pieces of the Scandinavian
peninsula.

 

2.

Gothenburg, Sweden  1983.  The human drama, pathetic and comic, is constricted
to one on one confrontations. Figures reduced to icons poised in opposition.
The compass arrow swings from the outer to the inner, now pointing at human
dilemma and sordid conflict. This is the orientation driving a series of figurative
paintings extending into the 90s. Overlapping these concerns and emerging late
in the 1980s come `Geologies´, a series of eight or so paintings which I saw as
a metaphor towards internal layers of personal faults and stresses.

San Diego, CA. 1991. At this juncture I feel a striving to locate in painting that
which has no likeness: something apparent yet not represented, a quality not
known but immanently human.
The hand painted image, a primitive ritual, a private hallucination made visible:
At once a medium of transcendence and an object to be swallowed as consumer
product. Atomized through print media, painting becomes a mosaic of words and
mantle of explanations like a hot coverage over  the body of art.

On television, automobile sales personnel rhapsodize over the creamy image of a four-
wheeled dream capsule as it skids through the showroom window onto the gallery
floor , a new model of hydrocarbon aesthetics. Painting has yet to make it as a
´hot item ´on TV.
Enter the serene white cube of exhibition space sanitized of the threatening fertility
of the cave. Here we can view and possess painting with little risk of ourselves being possessed.
It’s a new archeology: The art of the living dead  recycling images and objects as if  in      retrograde motion. Backing into the future looking through the rear-view mirror,
painting is propelled by the past into a present starved of a myth for the future.

My sources are everywhere; leaves rotting and gleaming under the trees, micro-organisms, planetary surfaces and atmospheres. I don’t see much value in terms like realism or abstraction. I’m attracted more to a direct viewer/object – subject/experience relation.
One doesn’t need a forest of judgments and descriptions between oneself and contemporary art.
R.H.