Nothing, Arizona 3

Altered States
Hills Snyder

Altered States is an ongoing writing/drawing project begun in 2016. A string of destinations, selected according to the evocative power of their names, were visited in search of some kind of profile of the American character. Utopian ideals, idealized pasts, mythical futures, downers, reckonings, false hopes, every day aspirations, states less defined, a spectrum of emotions and conditions float in a country of association.

Beginning in Nowhere, I plotted my route through Happy, Bonanza and Lost Springs to get to a residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming where the first fifty drawings were produced. During my time there, I did side trips to Recluse, Keystone, and Opportunity. At the end of the residency, the project continued as I traveled to Diamondville, Eden, Eureka, Bummerville, Nothing, Truth or Consequences, El Dorado, Waterloo, Lost Nation, Downer, Donnybrook, and Funk.

In the stories there is a correspondence between a pencil drawing a line and a needle playing a record, a sort of alchemical connection to field recording. The linear nature of following unknown roads also figures into the way the story is wound into the search. The focus is always on the peripheral, the abandoned, the overlooked. Unimportance is foregrounded within simple acts of focus, sensing the center of the world in “unlikely” places. There are sometimes events in the drawings that signal some sort of grapple with depiction, but mostly they are made in an atmosphere that allows cracks in the façade of physical reality.