Æmen Ededéen (Josh Hagler, RAiR 2017-18) and Maja Ruznic are returning to Roswell to give a presentation and artist talk that will be as thoughtful and profound as it will be aesthetically engaging. You don’t want to miss this one!
August 30, 2025 at 5 PM,
Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art
Artist Bios:
Æmen Ededéen
Æmen Ededéen, formerly known as Joshua Hagler, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work profoundly explores the intersections of memory, mysticism, and lived experience. Born in 1979 in Idaho, Ededéen has cultivated a singular visual language over two decades, constructing haunting, visceral compositions that operate on both psychological and spiritual levels. His paintings do not simply present images—they conjure atmospheres, internal states, and symbolic narratives that invite introspection and confrontation.
Ededéen’s style is unmistakably his own: emotionally charged and intellectually rigorous. He allows accidents to coexist with control, embracing the painterly gesture as both a form of expression and an act of excavation. Applying pigment and materials in layers and subsequently scraping it away, the artist’s process mirrors the search for veiled meanings and the experience of the numinous. In many ways, his canvases function like palimpsests—layered records of thoughts, revisions, and erasures.
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. 2021 marks two solo exhibitions for Hagler with “Drawing in the Dark” at Cris Worley in Dallas and “The Living Circle Us” at Unit London, curated by David Anfam. 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, as well as his own poems and essays, have appeared in a variety of publications and media outlets in the U.S. and other parts of the world. His monograph Nihil: Joshua Hagler in New Mexico written by John Yau is coming out in July 2025 with Unicorn Publishing. In January 2026, the artist will present the exhibition of new paintings from his ongoing series titled The Glass Dream Game.
Maja Ruznic
Maja Ruznic (b. Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1983) fuses personal narrative, psychoanalysis, mythology, and esoteric thought into vivid paintings that hybridize figuration and abstraction. Painting variably with oils and gouache on immense and small scales alike, she extracts order from layers of diluted pigment. Ruznic’s practice is informed by her studies, from Slavic shamanism and alchemy to Jungian psychoanalysis and sacred geometry. Imbued with a discordant beauty, her compositions emerge without a premeditated outcome. Ruznic’s introspective, mystical approach places her into a lineage of visionary painters including Paul Klee and Hilma af Klint. Ruznic lives in Placitas, New Mexico.
Recent solo exhibitions include those held at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2024); Karma (New York, 2024, Los Angeles, 2023); Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque (2022); and Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico (2021). Ruznic’s work is held in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Dallas Museum of Art; EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland; Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico; Jiménez–Colón Collection, Puerto Rico; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Rachofsky House, Dallas; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Her work was recently on view in the Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Ruznic’s work is currently on view in the 12th International, Once Within a Time, at SITE SANTA FE, New Mexico.