“As artists, it's our duty to do things like this—to use our voices to point out mistreatment and wrongdoing.”
— Ron Hagell
As we turn the corner on July and its sweltering days, consider exploring Ron Hagell’s Tiny Gallery show, “Acrylidemic,” from the cool four walls of your home. To learn more about the show, which runs until the end of this month, and about Hagell’s life, keep reading!
Hagell’s father and grandfather were both artistic creators who inspired him, and the stories of his grandfather’s work linger still today. Hagell’s grandfather was a Canadian cowboy and artist, born in Alberta in the late 19th century, who painted adventures inspired by the natural landscape of the West.
While Hagell always loved art, drawing throughout his childhood and school-age years, he didn’t go to school for it. The first official art classes he took were electives in college after he joined the army who sent him to school in the late 60s.
After the army, and with a family to support, Hagell sought a career in film and television. His creative work bloomed in this realm of digital media, directing and creating films and taking and editing photographs. Hagell was a producer and director with PBS for several years before moving onto more hands-on work, making art for films and his own short films.
“I did a lot of different kinds of artwork in this period, mainly making short films, various kind of experimental films related to time,” Hagell imparts, “I did a lot related to how you tell a story that is constantly jumping around in time.”
Moving away from the administrative work at PBS, Hagell taught in universities in London before returning to South Carolina where he pursued an MFA in Film at the University of South Carolina. Being in the digital industry for so long means Hagell has grown along the timeline of film, from developing in darkrooms to digital manipulations, all while reveling in the expansion of creative limitations.
This desire to push the boundaries of creativity was what led Hagell back to painting, exploring watercolor, oil, and acrylic–the latter being what he sits within the most these days. He also pursued many interests, inspirations, and subject matters, seeing the ways his hands could create stories refracted within and away from the films he spent years on.
Some of Hagell’s art stems directly from his film adventures. His Dancer on Glass Series, specifically, was inspired by short films he made involving choreography and dance design in tandem with the female body. This tension between how fluid the body’s movements are and how individual movements appear when frozen in one moment is featured in several pieces in “Acrylidemic.”
In addition to 7 of these dancers, Hagell’s show features a mix of portraits, still lifes, and socially perceptive creations, altogether presenting a culmination of Hagell’s past experience and present experimentation.
Portraiture is not an unfamiliar genre to Hagell, but he has been exploring new avenues of it in the past year, especially since he started as a non-degree seeking graduate student in the art department at the University of South Carolina. Specifically, these portraits use tones and colors that are “unnatural” like the blue skin in his MLK portrait.
“I had that photograph of him stuck on my bulletin board and, and when George Floyd happened, I decided to paint it,” he shares, “I've changed it a bit, of course—he’s on high looking down, and he’s blue, which I feel is a representative wash of today.”
Along the same lines, some of the still lifes emerge as a photographer’s take on capturing a moment no longer present yet still relevant. His pieces “Carolina 1950” and “Colored” are inspired by the era of Jim Crow and segregation that he lived through. While a photograph of this exchange can no longer be taken today, its effects are still felt, and images like this collapse past and present.
Hagell is not a stranger to including sociopolitical messages in his work. “Bite the Bullet,” his large-scale American flag detailed by bullets, is one of his best-known pieces. For him, pieces with these messages are distinctly important as artists are the only ones who can tell stories with the power of their medium.
“When I first was living in the South, I was really quite turned off to here, but when I came back, I witnessed change and started commenting on it” he asserts, “As artists, it's our duty to do things like this—to use our voices to point out mistreatment and wrongdoing.”
While Columbia still has growing to do, Hagell is proud to be here and proud of the ways our city has grown over the years, intimating that “Columbia has come a long way, both in the city’s interest in art and in a social sense—I hope this is just the beginning of things getting better.”
Hagell’s show can be viewed anytime between now and July 31st via Jasper’s virtual Tiny Gallery site: https://the-jasper-project.square.site/tiny-gallery
To follow Hagell’s future work, which includes a burgeoning collaborative effort where he is weaving an AR-15 into elements of a church, follow his Facebook @artbyronhagell.
— Christina Xan