Song Swap: Altered States

Altered States (Part Eight) @ Phil Space, Santa Fe.
On view: October 25, 2024–May 1, 2025.

Last month, Phil Space hosted Nancy Zastudil in a conversation with Hills Snyder and James Hart in the midst of Snyder’s show, Altered States. We had a full house that evening and have extended the show until May 1, 2025.

The conversation with Zastudil begun that evening will continue soon on Glasstire, a Texas-based online magazine.

Also, on Thursday, April 3, at 7 pm, Hart and Snyder will offer a song swap in which James will perform mostly traditional songs in counterpoint to Hills’s originals.

Altered States is an ongoing writing/drawing project begun by Snyder 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.

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.