Art Report Today's virtual Gallery One was pleased to present 'Altered States (Part Seven),' an art work by Hills Snyder in 2020. The show comprised a series of drawings, 'Altered States', maps, time, place and our humanity over many road trip miles.

The landscape of this show was so expansive, we thought it fitting to let artists, curators, art writers, critics and gallerists ask the big questions in our Q&A, Part One.

Today we present Q&A, Part Two, 2024, on the occasion of 'Altered States' (Part Eight) opening at Phil Space, Santa Fe, NM.

~ Gordy Grundy, Art Report Today

 

“Certainties deaden the heart and shackle the imagination.”
~ Ivan Illich

“If you’re going to put your tongue in your cheek, don’t point at it with your tonsils.” ~ The Intoxicating Angel

James Hart, artist, Director, Phil Space, Santa Fe, NM

James Hart: Hills, living with 'Altered States' in my exhibition space, as well as having you stay in my home some days in the past month has felt to me like a wild crash course on you and your art. Conversations with you, and now my interactions with visitors to the gallery are all charged with an endless train of ideas and thought-provoking responses that your drawings evoke. I could ask about your thoughts on the road trips of Lewis and Clark, Tocqueville, and Kerouac; the writings of Wallace Stegner; and the voyage of Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck to the Sea of Cortez.

Or ask about your thoughts on Non-teleological thinking, and if you know about the Traveling Salesmen Problem, the model and make of your vehicle, and on and on and on.

The value of the ideas your drawings evoke in regards to how we stand now looking at current conditions of the American West and our life on this earth cannot be pushed aside or diminished, but for me now, I cannot ask you a question having to do with those subjects because I feel doing so would just add to a compilation of thoughts and word.

“There's something happening here, and I don’t know what it is.”

My Question for you is: Taken individually, do you see your 'Altered States' drawings as Descansos?

Hills Snyder: I like this question so much. Decsansos proliferate like the 25th hour of scattered love rising alongside so many of the roads I am repeatedly on in New Mexico. I usually mark these moments internally when I pass by or through them. Each is so specific to the person it is about and they are so well attended to and maintained, with additions. You can feel the concern and connection.

Eden, Utah 3 could be a Descanso for an exhausted nation, asleep at the wheel, with power towers anchored in hillsides harboring valleys deep enough for grief, with antennas as proxy crosses…

But really, this is a beautiful idea that I had not considered. Just thinking about the drawings in this way, as marking the missing, has enlarged the project.

The Traveling Salesmen Problem you mentioned is easily solved with The Wayside Ploy which posits that the shortest line between two points is in actuality the least efficient way to travel because the true purpose of the trip is always unknown. There is some relevant material in 'Altered States', Part One, Glasstire, November 1, 2016.

There was a time driving through Wyoming when a large lime green rubber ball came bouncing across the road in front of me. There was nothing but grass for miles in a wide expanse beneath a mountain range in the distance. No human indications of any kind, not even a fence. I decided to retrieve the ball and pulled over. It was a high wind, so now the energy that brought the ball into view was working against the retrieval, but after several minutes I got it when it lodged against a couple of trees. It rode in the truck the rest of that trip and lived in the yard in San Antonio for several years before being left behind when we moved to Magdalena.

Ford Ranger.

Patrick Kikut, artist, Co-director, No Man’s Land, Santa Fe, NM

Patrick Kikut: I have a curiosity about how you set out for your destinations. I wonder how you map your trips.

Hills Snyder: The route is determined by the locations of American towns with evocative names which might speak to the actual or idealized state of the nation. I view the place names of the primary destinations in the project as if they are written on the walk-boards of a scaffolding erected around some larger than life something that isn’t there. It is this developing scaffolding that will eventually define the contour. A case could be made that there are typologies of similarity, veins of like-ness, running through the places I’ve chosen to define the route, but my type is so specific, a representation of “the American character,” such that similarities to other types of town names disappears. Waterloo and Donnybrook or Eden and Opportunity exist in a conversation that is different than a conversation about odd or funny town names.

PK: Do you wander or Beeline it to get as many locations in as you have time for?

HS: Wandering is the mode. Since I’m collecting photographs from which to draw, there are lots of lateral moves, lingers, and stops.

PK: Do you try to bring along music or books that would be appropriate for the given locations?

HS: I carried a copy of Mark Twain’s Life on The Mississippi with me as I drove a line always west of that river.

An unrealized project I’ve thought about has to do with transposing experiences on I-35 with those on The Mississippi. 35 is an Interstate Highway connecting Laredo, on the Texas/Mexico border with Duluth, Minnesota, 160 miles east of the headwaters.

I didn’t crack the book on the trip, just had it laying there as a touchstone of Americana. It was written before the Civil War about the author’s life as a steamboat captain, so as an artifact it exists before and after the historical watershed that we can only know from this side. We are still living in the wake of it.

PK: Do you prefer to travel alone or with company?

HS: For a project, probably alone.

PK: What does an ideal trip look like to you?

HS: In the project, I’m wrestling with ideal vs. real, macro vs. micro, peripheral vs. façade, etc., so the ideal trip would involve plenty that is less than ideal.

Chris Oglesby, artist, creator of Virtual Lubbock, Austin, TX

Chris Oglesby: I am interested in and often fascinated by an artist’s method in producing a piece, as much as in the art itself. How do you transport your art materials while you are traveling? For instance, but not limited to this example, do have a special case, bag, or box with a story?

HS: I used a Canon digital camera that wore out from use. All the drawing happened later, by just looking at a selected photo for a few minutes. Some initial decisions create a space in the drawing that is not in the photo. I follow that.

I do have a bag that I found in Chavin, Peru. It is made of pinkish-red faux-corduroy, with a strap, odd buckles, a chrome and orange smiley face emblem, a drawstring, and a torn lining. The best features are odd black leather shapes of a hand and foot sewn onto it. What I carry in it varies.

CO: When on the road making art, where do you sit (or stand or recline) to draw?

HS: The rule I followed was to photograph everything that I had an impulse to shoot, without question. I only knew why sometimes.

I was tempted to recline on this random roadside mattress I came across after a particularly long couple of days trying to find Bummerville.

Tonee Harbert, artist, Director, Anderson Museum, Roswell, NM

Tonee Harbert: How did you find Bummerville, California?

HS: Like the bear in the song, I went over the mountain. In this case, the Sierra Nevada. Twice.

Alison Hearst, Curator, Modern Art Museum of Ft. Worth, TX

Alison Hearst: What do you listen to on these frequent road trips?

HS: From my point of view, there is no understanding of the country possible without an ongoing appreciation of American music, but for 'Altered States' I made a point of not listening to anything. I wanted the circle of influence to be within viewable reach. I made an exception and listened to Mohammed Ali’s memorial for several hours as I drove through Arizona in June of 2016.

Barbara Grothus, Artist, Albuquerque, NM

Barbara Grothus: I admire the confidence of your lines. I reexamined images by some personal drawing heroes. They are often more sketchy, though their lines are sure in my mind. I'm an eraser.

the track of the train

cuts a line through the terrain a line

I drew with my own hand

Your writing has a depth and lyricism that regularly wanders, and I lose my way, though maybe I'll reach Bummerville one day.

Your process with the photos seems both lyrical and certain, perhaps like fingering the strings in the music, written and played. Is there a feeling that connects the sureness of your fingers with the pencil and the strings?

HS: Your question makes me think of The Clovers’ Pennies from Heaven. The piano notes are all on high end of the keyboard, conflating the plink of falling pennies with the sound of raindrops.

In the moment of the gesture, I reach for a sure hand whether I find it or not, whether I’m drawing or playing guitar.

BG: Are there drawings that fail, that you discard?

HS: Some are more satisfying than others, but I see this process to be one of documentation, so I don’t discard them.

BG: Do you start over? Is there a point of no return?

HS: No. And I make a point of stopping before I think I should.

Michael Thompson (Mvskoke), Poet, Teacher, Rancher, Crystal, NM

Michael Thompson: One of the aspects of your work that most intrigues me is the tension/balance in the liminal space between exteriority and interiority. Given that your wanderings are so often among literally wide-open spaces, is it fair to assume that your inner self has evolved a similar boundless sense of freedom?

HS: Boundlessness is not something I can assume I’m feeling, but thinking about this in terms of the story being told, it feels as if “exterior” has been a random series of discoveries within a guiding aspect that is not random, a given day’s specific destination within the purposes of the project. “Interior” is indeed released on the road from the parameters of daily work, such that imagination plays a role that is less linear than the highway, but I was always aware of driving at the center of circle defined by the length of my vision in any given direction.

MT: Given the omnipresent intrusion of the man-made and industrial upon the natural world, which you so keenly note, are there ever moments in certain spaces that strike you as surprisingly pure, wholly graced?

HS: The parallel wood that I happened onto in Oklahoma felt as though it was a place apart. I knew nothing of it prior to walking into it. It had a bit of a “Tron” feeling because you’re moving through a grid of trees planted equidistantly. Each point of reference is every point of reference. Ariadne’s thread came immediately to mind, but I got no sensation of Minotaur. It might be a place where the membrane gets thin—as you say, liminal.

MT: You appear, to me at least, to use color both sparingly and yet precisely. I sense a particular palette in your pocket. Are certain hues essential to your creative language?

HS: The appearance of color in these small drawings is intuitive and somewhat impulsive, but with restraint. I’ve always been partial to a blue orange brown cluster and a blue maroon yellow cluster.

Jerry Wellman, Research Investigator and Arts Fabricator, Co-Director, Axle Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM

Jerry Wellman: How do the "amateur" investigations into philosophy shape your art work, and art working process?

HS: The conversation we had at the opening about Timothy Morton was a highlight of the evening.

Stairway to Heaven, a work from 2000, featured drawings of the “smiley cross” installed from the floor toward the ceiling in stair-stepped rows. Each row of drawings was half the size of the previous row. The first three drawings, arranged like a step in a corner, were 32 inches square. These were followed by rows of drawings 16 inches, 8, 4, 2, down the final row of 48 one-inch drawings staircasing their way to one half inch from the ceiling. Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox…

Yesterday I was considering how one corner of any cardboard box is by necessity made with a seam. That seam speaks directly to an aspect of the human condition. We know there is the seam, but where is it?

Marcia Butler, author, doc film maker, designer, musician, Santa Fe, NM

Marcia Butler: Hills, I’ve seen two groupings of your drawings — those based on Magdalena at Warehouse 1-10 (in Magdalena) and your large project at Phil Space in Santa Fe. With every picture I wondered about the lines not drawn, or, the story not told. I relate to this as an author. There’s the linear narrative and then the details a writer leaves out in such a way that the reader may intuit them on their own. All of which leads me to ask: In making these pictures, did you think about what to omit on a conscious level, or was it intuitive? Also, absolutely everyone in New Mexico and maybe even Texas too, wants to know what’s in your sock drawer, other than socks.

HS: Maybe intuitive at the beginning, then conscious when something begins to appear. In addition, there is a constant readiness for the unplanned, which I also keep in my sock drawer.

I like the incomplete in fiction because life is incomplete.

Michael Bisbee, Artist, Magdalena, NM

Michael Bisbee: Do you plan to forage through additional states if this is an ongoing project?

HS: Yes, if opportunities arise, I’d like to complete the map west of the Mississippi, by going to Fair Play, Missouri; Mayflower, Arkansas; Arcadia, Louisiana; Culdesac, Idaho; Halfway, Oregon; and Crystal Mountain, Washington.

MB: Your visual language seems to have been very consistent throughout. Have you encountered situations where you felt a need to expand your range or use different media (photo-collage, sound, found objects, etc.)?

HS: The first iteration of 'Altered States' was just the first fifty drawings made at Ucross shown in small grids separated by space and organized according to place: Nowhere, Lost, Happy, Opportunity, Bummerville, etc. were applied to the wall in four-inch letters, hand calligraphed with ebony pencil by my friend Jeremiah Teutsch.

The most recent version of the show, at Phil Space in Santa Fe, features some tears drawn on the wall in opposing relationships with gravity.

When the show appeared in Lubbock, it was shown with How Big Is Your Love? a life-scale drawing of a ’59 Cadillac convertible, acknowledging the road in another way. And the online serial narrative is another media riding parallel. These are the versions that have stepped outside the grid on this project. But anything could happen.

Jeremiah Teutsch, Artist, San Antonio, TX

Jeremiah Teutsch: I know you’re a huge fan of film, so I can only imagine that the title of your project is a direct reference to Ken Russell’s film of the same name. I guess I’d like to know if your drawings are done while you’re in an “altered state” in some form or other. (Not even necessarily psychedelics; the main character of the film has some “altered state” experiences just being in an isolation tank.) Incidentally, 'Altered States' is one of my favorite visual effects movies, and it really had an impact on me when I first saw it as a weirdo teenager, so I’ve always appreciated you calling your project 'Altered States'.

HS: I did see and like the film, but that phrase “'Altered States'” seems almost like public domain to me, so I don’t believe I was thinking of the film. I knew it first as the title of a Charles Tart book. Maybe the film and my project are both referencing some third thing. The movie is a worthy retelling of stories like Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, The Wolfman, Frankenstein, and other fictional inquiries into the ethics of evolution.

Just the focused fun of drawing is altered state enough. But really, no, that wouldn’t be my way. Setting myself a task while tripping would be a waste of good medicine.

Justin Boyd, Artist, Musician, San Antonio, TX

Justin Boyd: When I see the 'Altered States' body of work, I feel I am experiencing both the past and present simultaneously, but through the haze of memory. Do the lines of energy and negative spaces relate in any way to multi-dimensionality?

HS: Yeah, I like to say these drawings are quantum fantasies—quantum, because I can’t see into that world; fantasy because I’m pretending I can.

There is a specific abandoned gas station on 380 in New Mexico I’m thinking of. It’s a bit of a self-contained miniature apocalypse mixed with nostalgia for a time when highways, far flung gas stations, and neon motels were the new aesthetic of freedom in America.

Coming upon traces of previous human presence and decay on the road is like being present in someone else’s past. Or maybe the family car stopped there for fuel when I was a kid. A La Jette vibe is what I’m getting thinking about it right now.

Chris Taylor, Director, Land Arts of The American West at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX

Chris Taylor: Reading through your 'Altered States' notes and drawings I found myself thinking of one of my favorite Charles Bowden books Blood Orchid (Random House, 1995). Pulling it off the shelf just now it opened to a page I had marked, which also included a boarding pass of a ‘frequent traveler’ {that I do not know} for US Air flight 133 on 6 January {no year} from Providence, Rhode Island to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania at 7:15am, seat 13F. The marked paragraph reads:

“Imagine the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is not biodiversity, it is not the ozone layer, it is not the greenhouse effect, the whales, the old-growth forest, the loss of jobs, the crack in the ghetto, the abortions, the tongue in the mouth, the diseases stalking everywhere as love goes on unconcerned. Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can effect real change, that our civilization, our governments, are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness. Imagine the problem is not that we are powerless or that we are victims but that we have lost the fire and belief and courage to act. We hear whispers of the future but we slap our hands against our ears, we catch glimpses but turn our faces swiftly aside.”

I’m struck by how much all this interconnects, and with this moment in the early evening of 3 November 2024. I’m impressed with your commitment to venture out there, to look, listen, engage, and bring back whispers for others. You are not turning away. The openness of your drawings appears as opportunities for other stories, other futures (as well as other pasts) to develop. I’m curious first if you are familiar with Bowden’s Blood Orchid, particularly his last ride with Robert Sundance from Los Angeles to Montana? And, perhaps, more importantly, how talk of these whispers, or screams, resonate with the expansive pursuits of your project?

HS: I don’t know Blood Orchid, but now that you’ve pointed me to it, I’ve just read a review of it that I liked. The review turned out to be by William Kittredge, a writer I got into when I lived in Montana.

The last two lines of the passage you marked are reminiscent I think of Won’t Get Fooled Again, especially the line, “the hypnotized never lie.” Townshend was always good at including himself as a target in his cultural critiques.

So, yeah, what I read of the Bowden book resonates.

Other pasts. I’m very interested in this. Drawn to the abandoned and neglected stuff that piles up along the edges of human habitat. We drive past these scenes in the present, seeing them as the dilapidated past. It’s that then futuristic moment of new highways and regional motels, frequently gone to ruin as we move toward a future that will contain the relics of our present. So, the apocalypse is in the past, a visual premonition of our future. But really, I think the apocalypse is a place in the human psyche. Possibly right next to the misaligned “conspiracy theory” structure.

I don’t think I’m venturing more than anyone else is, so I’m not sure what I may be bringing back that people don’t already know.

Melynda Seaton, Associate Professor of Art History & Gallery Director, East Texas A & M University, Commerce, TX

Melynda Seaton: I see your project as capturing the iconography of the “West” and the essence of the places you’ve visited. How do you define the West? Do you see your work adding to the myth or deconstructing it?

HS: One defining characteristic of the West is that the physical region only fought in the American Civil War around the edges, with just a few of battles in the Great Plains west of a line formed by the eastern borders of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. And these three states combine for a cultural constellation that informs the rest of the West: Free State Kansas, Indian Territory Oklahoma, and Confederate State Texas. There are other prominent edges too—the Mississippi River, the Continental Divide, flows of water and music.

Film and literature are a huge part of the mythmaking and its deconstruction. To get at the Myth you need both, the ideal and the real.

BTW, I recommend a book, Scorpio Rising by R.G. Vliet.

MS: Follow-up question: Thinking about iconography, your “icons” appear in a void, a departure from stereotypical American Western Art that emphasizes grand vistas of the natural landscape. Despite the imagery being derived from physical places you travel to, the “icons” are removed from their original context and the physical landscape in which they reside. Since traveling to places is central to the project, how do you see the imagery representing place when the physical landscape is missing?

HS: Thanks to what the indigenous populations have known for centuries and seven John Ford films, Monument Valley has become important in Western iconography, yet those cinematic vistas are filled with emptiness and negative space. The open-ness of the space is no less a presence than are the Mittens and Merrick Butte.

That landscape and the high desert of eastern Oregon are different flavors of open space, and John Ford‘s widescreen is tempered by the frame of pioneer women’s bonnets in Kelly Reichert’s Meeks Cutoff, which has a square aspect ratio, the opposite of VistaVision. Reichert’s framing is a form of myth-busting—empty space has a voice, depends on how you frame it.

Maybe the sixteen-foot grid of drawings is my widescreen, with each drawing a zoom lens. The project really hasn’t been about representing the place so much as a situation in which place names represent something else that they are collaborating with for the possibility of telling a story.

Chad Dawkins, Curator, Critic, Visiting Assistant Professor for Art and Visual Culture, Spelman College, Atlanta, GA

Chad Dawkins: West Texas boys drive a lot and think a lot while they’re doing it. What’s a story about Terry Allen’s Lubbock on Everything album?

HS: Love that record. I made an 8-track copy of it for my brother-in-law in the summer of ’79 so he could play it in his car. When I was in High School, ten years before that, he was racing his ’57 Plymouth Fury in Stock at the Amarillo dragstrip. He was the first person to ever teach me a song on guitar.

One song on Lubbock on Everything that really takes me is I Just Left Myself. On one hand, kind of a pill for the new-age-inclined, but also an acknowledgment of the tendency to sometimes just check out or get derailed by ego.

CD: What if Cervantes’ Don Quixote is the potential of the blank pictorial space and Borges’s version is the elements filling it? Where does that put you?

HS: It puts me on 83 to Menard, cataloging the elements with a pencil on an envelope against the steering wheel, while not being completely convinced by what I see through the windshield and romanticizing it anyway.

CD: Can you describe the difference between the sound of the plains and sound of the mountains?

HS: The plains sing. The song of the mountains is more of a hum.

Bett Williams, Writer, Santa Fe, NM

Bett Williams: Bruce Chatwin in his book Songlines, writes about how songs are inseparable from geography, how in Australian aboriginal culture, a song is a map of a topography and all that has happened there in memory. Is there a song that lives in your work? What place does it connect you to?

HS: Song is essential. And it can locate time in a place. Where you were when you heard a song on the radio or wrote one in your head. Or if you know that driving from Santa Fe, NM to Trinidad, CO and back measured in Steely Dan albums exactly spans all of them save Gaucho.

But what Chatwin is writing about predates the written word, not to mention driving on a highway in the 21st Century. I would not hazard to say that I know that land/memory/song continuum in the same way, but I do know that song is not only essential, it is inevitable. If I was going to name a place that song connects me to, it would be Solitude, Night, Wonder at being alive.

Alex Gregory, Curator, Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, TX

Alex Gregory: Do you experience synesthesia while working, or drawing on, recollections of a place? Does a place’s temperature, sound, smell, and flavor consciously make its way into the work?

HS: Maybe when I’m writing, and yes, a drawn line can make a sound that is not made by the pencil. Kind of like the sound of a horse whinny in the film U-Turn, which happens when a key is scraped across the hood of a Ford Mustang.

Even so, the drawing process I’m employing is so mitigated—sites discovered randomly within a framework that is intentional, “documented” photographically, the resulting photographs only lightly looked at before exploring the “place” that appears on the paper.

AG: What do you find most interesting about a place…what you find there, or what you don’t find there?

HS: People make stuff I like to look at in their yards. This is everywhere. Sometimes the components are the same across regions. People erect images, altars, setups, installations, whatever term you want to put on it, this is storytelling, no less basic than eating and breathing. This is activity embedded securely in the human psyche.

Seeing the same terrain repeatedly is where not finding comes in to play. “Same” is just a mental construct, it’s never the same.

AG: In your travels, have you most often encountered optimism and generosity or pessimism and selfishness?

HS: I rarely meet anyone that isn’t kind, whether within the travel of this project or not.

Hannah Dean, Artist, Curator, Part-owner and Senior Editor of Cloudcroft Reader, Cloudcroft, NM

Hannah Dean: What’s in a name? We see through your travels, place, culture, mark. What about the folks you meet along the way? Do you see predestination, for lack of a better word, at work in human monikers? (And in your own?)

HS: The most memorable person I met was running a bar in Austin, Nevada, The Owl. It wasn’t that late, so I don’t think the moniker was necessarily true for her, though she did seem wise.

It was Chris Oglesby that said my name is ironic. He was probably looking at a “ski Lubbock” poster when he wrote that.

Bruce Holsapple, poet, Magdalena, NM

Bruce Holsapple: You clearly have the intention to make art and a distinct way of fulfilling that intention, an approach. That you're exhibiting the work indicates you must feel you've succeeded at times, perhaps at different levels. I wondered if you can articulate what you have succeeded at? And how you know that?

HS: Receiving an idea, making something work physically, making it add up conceptually, connecting through it to someone else --- all are measures of that. It is some kind of vibe exchange that feels like an infusion of energy that says this is what life is for, that exchange.

Same thing just thinking of something that is in the pocket. I know you know the feeling. When you feel it while you are making something that you know is going to work well.

Thinking of it in terms of others experience of it puts you in their shoes. A small room of people listening to what you’re singing or witnessing a single person going into the work while they tell you about it, both give a good feeling. In fewer words, it’s love. It has to be similar to what other species feel when they are with others of their kind.

Sara Jayne-Parsons, Director/Curator, The Art Galleries at TCU School of Art

Sara Jayne-Parsons: This is a fantastic project! I loved reading the text and exploring the drawings. Also, it feels apt to read right now, on the eve of an election. Thank you for inviting me to collaborate. What happened in Seymour? Tell me about (or draw) your invisible friend.

HS: Much the way a cat might shift blame to a dog in a cartoon, I kept the invisible friend on standby, just in case I needed to vacate whatever the situation was. You have to understand, they were trying to frame me.

Nancy Zastudil, Editor/Writer, Albuquerque, NM

Nancy Zastudil: What was the name of the invisible friend you had as a kid?

HS: Not sure I should say. He might be listening.

NZ: Do you ever get lonely on the road? If so, what's your remedy (if you want one)?

HS: I don’t usually get lonely, but if I did, I’d find a canyon or some woods and walk in them, which would remind me I’m not alone.

NZ: One of my favorite books is Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau -- the same story told (at least) 100 different ways. Do people and places still surprise you?

HS: Another book I now have to read. I looked it up and discovered one of the styles that the story is told in is Spoonerism which reminded me of my dad who told a joke about the French Reign of Terror ending with “don’t hatchet your counts before they chicken.” You know the one, or if not, the whole joke is implied in the punchline line. I didn’t see Palindrome on the list, but I think attempting a combination of that form with Spoonerism could make for an interesting contortion to try.

So, yes. Isn’t life full of surprises? And might as well surprise it back, just to keep the ball in the air.

NZ: Do your drawings tell their own stories or do they tell versions of your travels?

HS: Honestly, I try to let them tell me.

NZ: Where are you going next?

HS: The Pacific Northwest or the Mississippi Delta if possible.

Jess Johnson, Artist, Roswell, NM

Jess Johnson: What have you learnt from cats?

HS: Joy, surprise, fascination. Mysteries of animal attachment, the way they are tuned into you.

JJ: I don’t know how to articulate this question succinctly and I don’t think this phrasing gets what I’m grasping at… but when you’re making art, is knowing or not-knowing more important to you?

HS: Not knowing feels honest. Knowing sounds like a preset limitation, though sometimes working within a frame is good.

JJ: Do you have any secret words or phrases that you repeat to yourself when you need them?

HS: I don’t know. I picked up the Dutch word “gezellig” when I spent several weeks in Amsterdam in 2001. It’s like when things are copacetic, cozy, fun.

Jennifer Davy, Artist & Writer, In Situ

Jennifer Davy: Thanks for the invitation to read and question.

Some response/reflections:

In Clayton, I believe on the main street (vs. the main drag) the boot cobbler turned down my request to repair the soles of my Chelsea pointy knock-off boots from DSW. I ended up buying a pair of used cowboy boots that were on offer because no one had come ‘round to retrieve them in a long, long while. A couple doors down, some gorilla tape from the hardware store healed my worn-out Chelsea-like soles.

“What manner of men are these who wrap their legs in parentheses.” ––that’s pretty funny.

Finding yourself so far north, pre & post tornado, and grass rolling…

Have you read No Time to Look Back?

Outside of macramé chickens, "Something close and small, that might possibly be taken for something large and far away” and its inverse, and other combinations, seems an apt metaphor for 'Altered States'.

Spot-on Willa Cather quote.

To share on your chronological reading list (many and I’m sure you’d add more possibly, but for now): Alllison Adelle Hedgecoke.

Heart Lenny Bruce graffiti––epic.

Given the long historical threads of our “dystopian" realities––anywhere––your drawings make somewhere there easy to love.

Questions:

Has the project altered your sensibilities, judgements, and/or discernment(s)?

HS: The process of doing these drawings in rapid succession has had effects. After the first several drawings I veered away from some of the more whimsical marks.

JD: Given the altered sense of country when you first started out and its now current reprise does the road look different, same, same but different?

HS: Going to have to go with “same but different.”

JD: Would the road find its path in the shape of a boomerang?

HS: “You become what you resist” is a truism that comes to mind in this context.

JD: Was/is the “country road” all that different or is it the windshield?

HS: Sometimes, it’s the country that is cracked.

JD: : If you settled somewhere without a name, would you give it one? if so, what name?

HS: If circumstances were just right, it could be called Pleasinoinktament.

Read A Time by Allison Adelle Hedge Coke on the Poetry Foundation website. Good stuff. Thank you!

I left No Time to Look Back where it lay, untouched, as a warning to other travelers tempted by entanglement.

Lynne Maphies, Artist, Writer, Albuquerque, NM

Lynne Maphies: “…places are witnesses, alive with knowledge that is there to be read, if only we can learn to look. If only we can bring ourselves to listen. We should ask ourselves in every study of any aesthetic object where it is set, where it was written or created, what the deep history of that place is, what peoples, animals, and materials once occupied it (and still do)…”

You stated previously that the “land we live on binds all people together” and I thought about the above Stephen Ross quote when viewing your work. Do you see yourself as creating the conditions for complicating conventional readings of the land we occupy?

HS: I had said it was the underlying reality of the land that binds us together, meaning that the physical fact of that is the binding, more so than any unifying cultural relationship. Your question is probably a question to be answered by the reader, but I would think the more readings the better.

LM: You mentioned previously that you try to “listen for the unimportant things to speak.” I was reminded of a fragment I read about the boundaries between sound listened to and heard, between meaningful sound and background hums, and how sound influences how people perceive and relate to spaces and places; embodiment. I can’t help but ask about your attentiveness to sound and how that potentially manifests in these works?

HS: Speaks to intentionality. The places I stopped to take photographs were usually unoccupied, providing a quietude or silence that added to the sense of aftermath if I was photographing a decomposing site or a sense of discovery if I was in a neighborhood. It may appear in the writing more than the drawing, but probably not exclusively.

LM: “And there you have the most decorative landscape in the world … a dream landscape. The great struggle of the … landscapist is to get on with the least possible form and to suggest everything by tones of color, shades of light, drifts of air.”

John C. Van Dyke—who was quite the character, but we won’t get into that just now—penned the above lines in The Desert (1901). I’ve been looking for an artist who fits the bill and must admit, with rather minimal modification, you come pretty close. I guess the first question would be: do you consider yourself a landscapist?

HS: “Desert” comes from a root meaning abandoned, so this speaks to me. I could see myself drawing landscapes composed of subversive “Botticelli lines” as Buzz Spector once called them. A series of landscape drawings void of nostalgia seems like a worthy project.

As for the Van Dyke thing, I admit I made that up about Pernell Roberts.

Scott Sherer, Art Historian, Director of Galleries, UTSA, San Antonio, TX

Scott Sherer: Hills, I very much appreciate how your work is very much engaged with a host of paradoxical explorations into the conceptual character of what underlies lived experience. Indeed, the active methods in your artistic practice seem to respect neither the normative logistics and themes of travel that inherently carry a range both of coordinates of individual dynamics of time nor the geographies that develop from histories of nature and cultural transformation. Even with direct line work and white space, how do you make choices between dreams or nightmares, or single moments of reflection or humor, and return from the collapse of norms?

HS: I’ve been influenced I think by the René Daumal book Mount Analogue, about a mountain encircled by curved space which renders it routinely invisible, unless you’re looking for it. So maybe the drawings don’t represent what I’m looking at in the photograph, as much as they represent a fantasy about a world that is not only behind the photo, but is also behind what the photo is a representation of. Maybe those things you speak of, dreams, nightmares, reflection, humor, are life lines to pull yourself back with, so any one will do, given specific circumstances. Darkness in the world can leak in. Light too.

Jeff McMillan, Artist, London

Jeff McMillan: I keep seeing the drawings as road maps, (mostly) empty space with lines marking out shapes or territories, like hand-drawn directions of ‘how to get there’ (but I know you well enough to know the viewer needs to put some work in to arrive at the destination). Is there any mileage in this?

HS: I think so. Surrender is my thing when I go to a movie or to see someone’s art or whatever the medium may be, poetry, music, I want to enter what is being offered, not keep it at arm’s length. So, my work does work best for those that put something forth. Even so, the destination is not specific, but it gives back generously.

JM: I’ve been reading Moby Dick very recently, and in the chapter called the Whiteness of the Whale at one point Melville writes that white has ‘a dumb blankness, full of meaning’ and it comes to mind looking at your drawings. What are your thoughts on color in this series and particularly the relative absence of it?

HS: I have been deeply affected by a story titled The Dressmaker’s Dummy by Alain Robbe-Grillet. It is in his short story book Snaphots. It is phenomenological description that becomes disturbing when it is revealed that a ceramic tile base under a coffee pot, formerly described as hidden or indescribable, is actually adorned with a picture of an owl with large frightening eyes. A narrative shift takes place: at first everything in the scene is described with clinical detachment, then suddenly we are told of something that cannot be seen from the point of view we’ve been in within the story. Yes, the owl’s eyes are frightening because we’ve been told that they are, we imagine them that way, but the real change in the awareness of the reader takes place in that other shift, the one that is under the story, which asks, who is this that was not here before, that is suddenly describing what I cannot see?

JM: As it happens, the southernmost place in the United Kingdom is called Land’s End. Is there somewhere similar in the US you have seen the name of a final destination or a furthest place you want to get to?

HS: Yeah, you know they call Magdalena “Trail’s End.”

Alaska and Iceland stay in my wishes.

Andrew Weathers, Composer, Intermedia Artist, Littlefield, TX / Colorado Springs, CO

Andrew Weathers: You're often using the road and rural America as source and reference, coming from Lubbock and working as an artist in rural New Mexico, what is your relationship and interest in the rural parts of this country and particularly the Southwest?

HS: Living in and moving through this landscape has always been a fact of existence. Visiting family south of Clayton when I was young and since the late sixties, backpacking and hiking in Lincoln. So, re-exposure to the same road, the same trail, the same range, whatever it is, there is a lot to see and know in that repeated exposure to a landscape. There is a certain phone booth that is no longer there. There used to a be a red macaw in a shop window. A certain gate- latch that I can still hear and feel. These are the scenes where stories may be found.

Lubbock was pop. 129,000 when I lived there. It was a city with a. rural feel. I’ve lived in Miles City and Anaconda, Montana; Oskaloosa, Kansas, etc. I love cities too, especially New York, but some can be facades of homogeneity and even offer the exact same sets of distractions and obstructions. The public land I walk on every day is the same path, but it is different every time I walk it.

AW: Is William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways a reference point for this series? I ask because the book is structured in a similar way - Heat-Moon drives across the US plotting his course on interesting and unique town names.

HS: The list grows. I’ve heard of Blue Highways, but not got around to reading it. The town names that determined my route were not really chosen for uniqueness or oddity. Rather, they provide a construct about ideal in contrast to real, the essential contradiction.

Taylor Ernst, Curator, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for The Arts, Lubbock, TX

Taylor Ernst: The very first art I can remember seeing and knowing it was one of yours was How Big is Your Love? which is fondly known as Cadillac. I was the collections manager for the art division at the Museum of Texas Tech University and delivered this artwork to LHUCA for an exhibition, where I am now curator. We met a few months ago and ever since I often think of this linear connection and how everything happens for a reason. Do you think that art helps connect us in more ways than just the obvious?

HS: The best that ever came my way was through art.

TE: Could you explain how using lines in your artworks shapes the outcomes for such large impacts?

HS: Maybe because I meant them when I did them so that intention is in them.

Deana Craighead, Curator of Art, Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, Canyon, TX

Deana Craighead: Thank you so much for the invitation to participate in this project. I really enjoyed it and have so many questions, but will limit myself to two ideas that keep coming back to me.

The visit to your former home in Montana seems to have impacted you deeply and the corresponding drawing seems more focused in response. You also pick up a travel companion, the Immaculate Macramé Chicken, that reappears later in the work. Throughout human history, small objects that were carried close to the body tend to become intensely personal and talismanic. What drew you to the chicken? Why did you choose to bring it along for the rest of your journey? Where is the Immaculate Macramé Chicken now?

HS: That drawing was made for my son who was with me during the time I was in Miles City on an artist-is-the-schools residency.

The debris in the house I had lived in in ‘86 and ‘87 was a foot deep in 2016, when I visited and found the place abandoned. The chicken was so intact that it seemed illuminated from within. When I opened the door of my truck to drive on, it jumped in.

The idea that we live an existence in which an object may be felt as “talismanic” is a bit of a miracle, no? Maybe it’s got to do with memory and luck, two human attributes pointed in seemingly opposite directions, past and future, but through the power of the magic object, are actually collaborators in creating the present. The tension created by the pull of past and future resolves itself in our relationship with such objects, increasing awareness of the moment.

To bring this back to the chicken, it’s like I’m saying to it, “Are you with me? Let’s mark this.”

Right now, the chicken sits on a shelf at kind of a small array.

DC: In Q&A Part One, Ariane Roesch asks you about how Trump-era politics influenced the project. Given Trump’s recent re-election, would you like to amend your response?

HS: No.

DC: Ariane asked, “How much have Trump era antics shadowed this project?”

HS: The project began in May of 2016 and the question was asked in 2020, so the frame was coincidental, just as it is now, as the physical exhibition of the project has begun again in October 2024.

The shadow has remained through the four years between the last two elections, in which he continued to spread self-serving falsehoods.That is his currency, along with exaggeration, manipulation, and evading accountability. This has not changed. His shadow still falls over the country, but the spell he spins doesn’t cast one, so there is good reason to remain aware—he is the guy who failed to act while being “commander in chief,” watching TV, yearning to see the chaos he created come out favorably for his desire to stay in office after losing the election. He will do what he can to make the presidency more powerful than congress—that is the essence of their project.

DC: Ever questioning…

HS: Indeed.

Marisa Sage, Director, University Art Museum, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM

Marisa Sage: After the results on Tuesday which has me emotionally befuddled (though not shocked), there are loads of questions I could ask you regarding you having visited so many of the places which led the results of this election––for instance Sierra County, NM, where Truth or Consequences is located––the people overwhelmingly voted for Trump? Economically, their grocery prices are led by the fact that they have two sources to buy their goods, Walmart (controls grocery inflation in this country) and Bullocks (effected by inflation in this country) —I wonder if they thought about this when they were voting for Trump because "he can fix the economy for them?”

Anyway, with that all said, I might go with my gut for my question and ask you something that always comes to mind when thinking about towns such as Waterloo, Kansas. "Do you think Waterloo, Kansas lives in the shadow of its counterpart in Belgium? If not the shadow, aspires to be, compares itself to, has a Napoleon complex...? Do you think all US Eponymous towns have some form of complex and/or do you see connections between their namesakes?"

HS: Interesting. I’m unconsciously sliding my hand into my shirt to see if it helps me think about this.

Waterloo, Kansas was a post office first, with the name chosen from a list of other post offices, so maybe we have to conclude that maybe the other Waterloo is the one bearing the burden of the Napoleon Complex. Meanwhile, The Waterloo Center for The Arts in Waterloo, Kansas is said to have the most extensive collection of Haitian art in the world. So, take that, Belgium.

Anyway, to your first point, I’d say priorities for voters get defined locally, and that includes cost of living issues. The world was ham-strung by supply interruptions brought about by a pandemic which led to wide-spread inflation among nations. Incumbents all over the world have suffered losses based on a single myopic dynamic: whoever is in office when people are struggling, must go, all other considerations aside, regardless of corporate greed or any other explanation.

The truth of Trump’s nature could be written clearly around the vertical edge of the American “kitchen table,” but if that is where you’re sitting, there is no perspective from which it may be read. But this is just a metaphor—some saw him for what he is and voted for him anyway.

Barbara Purcell, Writer, Hudson Valley, NY

Barbara Purcell: What do you suppose we’ve learned—or unlearned—as the United States of 'Altered States' since this project kicked off in 2016?

HS: It is impossible to know what this noisy, but in reality, mute, beast has learned, but the evidence before us suggests that the grift continues. Meanwhile, beneath our feet, the actual country that was here before us, doesn’t really need us, and if we are not more careful, may unlearn us.

BP: If your windshield is a wide-angle lens while out on the open road, does the depth of field bring the obvious into focus...or just the overlooked?

HS: It is possible that this speaks to the relationship of “generic” and “obscure.” When things drift to the generic, they become no longer seen, so the visual presence of the obscure becomes more pronounced. This is a contradiction, but it may just be an expression of wavering human awareness. No one has yet made a mouse trap that defies co-optation into the field of the normal. Sliced bread came close, but there were issues.

BP: Ever been to Neversink, New York?

HS: No, but the Neversink River is a particularly peculiar American paradox. We put in and float, hoping to spot the shore, with oars made of I do not know what, maybe just elbow grease.

BP: Thank you for asking me to take part in the Q&A. 'Altered States' is a delightful chronicle of the creeping darkness. The following passage should be on a window, much like Willa Cather’s quote in Part Eight of the Glasstire narrative: "I’ve visited corners of this country hoping to randomly run across found beauties, overlooked events, discarded things, back roads — anything happening outside the frame of relevance and other assumptions of importance. Along the way I met some characters, people you'd love to meet, but never will. People I'll probably never see again."

During the pandemic I had to drive from California to the tip of Cape Cod—twice—and on both trips I drove past The Thing on I-10, which became the psychic center for my musings on America. I had an opportunity to take part in a poetry reading at The Whitney not long after, and this is what I shared:

The Thing

I-10 runs across the low belly of this country

Like a c-section scar

What is it, that they pulled from its incision?

The billboards begin just west of El Paso:

Mystery of the Desert. Exit 322.

A derailed freight train mangled on the horizon

We are getting closer to Benson, Arizona

The museum is a mausoleum in the middle of nowhere

A mummified woman and child

Presented in a plexiglass tomb.

Dinosaurs and aliens and a Rolls Royce Hitler once rode in

Welcome to The Thing: don’t forget to pay the cashier

Their bodies were bought by a lawyer from Texas

And put on display as a way to draw tourists

“Illegal border crossers,” it reads

“Found slaughtered by unknown cowboy bandits”

Here lies The Thing

Alien effigy of Manifest Destiny

Roadside attraction of radioactive mystique

Blow it up in the desert, then bury it deep

Geiger counters go crazy

In the arid ocean of the American imagination.

“What is it?” says the sign above the door.

Nothing you haven’t seen before.

Bryan Wheeler, Artist, Lubbock, TX

Bryan Wheeler: Thanks for this …work. Bad word for it. I’ve seen some of the drawings, none of the photos, and had read none of the writing. It’s all perfect and inspiring. And familiar, it speaks to me profoundly. And it’s full of surprising metaphors and turns-of-phrase.

I did a once over of the catalog and came up with several questions/thoughts. Do what you want with them: take ‘em to dinner and tell ‘em they look nice, make them account for themselves, or dispose of them properly.

The drawings may read as schematics, how-tos, or even rebuses. Are they clues, puzzles, guides for how to live in the post-modern western US?

HS: No reason it wouldn’t be useful to think of them in those ways. New meanings accrue.

BW: And to that, how much can we see by looking at what’s left behind, the aftermath? By focusing on the peripheral, the detrital?

HS: It’s humbling. Also, a place where beauty resides. Creates economies of use and movement. Contemplating the side-lined, the forgotten, the falling-apart, is just attempting to be in touch.

BW: And to that, shouldn’t we meet people on this trip? What does it say that we don’t?

HS: I met a few, but empty spaces were frequent. I spent an hour in Lost Springs, Wyoming and didn’t see a soul. The most memorable hang-time with people was in Austin, Nevada.

Also, the project has a self-aware degree of pretend-research, as if the researcher was unaware of his own subjectivity.

BW: What do you think of your drawings as post-modern pictographs? Would they work as well/communicate better on cave walls?

HS: They might have pictographic qualities, but I don’t really see them on cave walls. It would be defacing an actual cave or creating some kind of meta experience, neither of which interests me.

BW: What’s the relationship between this work and archaeology/ anthropology?

HS: Archaeology finds things. I’m planting things.

BW: What can we hope to see in the side-by-side juxtaposition of the detritus of the modern/post-modern (wagon wheel/big wheel)?

HS: The presence of wagon wheels is ubiquitous, nostalgia leaning against walls, signifiers of pioneer will, real and imagined. Big Wheels litter yards in a different way, as items of childhood play in a world long past the wagon trains of the 19th Century and are still being made, so they embrace nostalgia and erase it at the same time.

BW: What’s the word for the discovery of spatially and contextually related, but chronologically incongruous (modern/pre-modern), things found in situ, lying side-by-side? It’s not random or incidental or even adventitious…

HS: I think that is a parathintalism.

BW: How do you explain your shift from the baroque 1970-80s to the minimal 1990-2000s?

HS: Friendship with Fran Colpitt and the conversation we had for two-plus decades.

BW: Is page 31.3. true?

HS: The Shakespeare joke told by my dad. Absolutely true.

BW: What are the 1st three lines of Jorge Luis Borges’ Don Quixote?

HS: Borges’ first three lines are:

The visible oevre left by this novelist can be briefly enumerated; unpardonable, therefore, are the omissions and the addition of Mme. Henri Bachelier in a deceitful catalog that a certain newspaper, whose Protestant leanings are surely no secret, has been so inconsiderate as to inflict upon that newspapers’ deplorable readers—few and Calvinist (if not Masonic and circumcised) though they be. Menard’s true friends have greeted that catalog with alarm, and even with a degree of sadness. One might note that only yesterday we were gathered before his marmoreal place of rest, among the dreary cypresses, and already Error is attempting to tarnish his bright Memory…Most decidedly, a brief rectification is imperative.

Menard’s first three lines, which never appear in Borges’ text, are the same three lines of Cervantes’ Quixote:

There lived not long since, in a certain village of the Mancha, the name whereof I purposely omit, a gentleman of their calling that used to pile up in their halls, old lances, halberds, morions, and such other armours and weapons. He was, besides, master of an ancient target, a lean stallion, and a swift greyhound. His pot consisted daily of somewhat more beef than mutton: a gallimaufry each night, collops and eggs on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and now and then a lean pigeon on Sundays, did consume three parts of his rents; the rest and remnant therof was spent on a jerkin of fine puce, a pair of velvet hose, with pantofles of the same for the holy-days, and one suit of the finest vesture; for therewithal he honoured and set out his person on the workdays.

BW: Is this a love letter or post-mortem?

HS: Love letter.

Violette Bule, Artist, Houston, TX

Violette Bule: Hola Hills, Here are my questions for you. I'm not expecting answers unless you feel wanting to respond to them, some of them seem to find answers in your drawings themselves.

If you go backward, can you remember something that happened between the miles and hours, guided by the solid yellow centerline? Keeping the needle steady at the same number, listening to the sound, sounding the same, did it feel meditative or unavoidable? Were you herenow, or somewhere, perhaps imagining that movie, or remembering something else? Can you recall what it was like between mile 129 and mile 133? Somewhere between the sun in your eyes, and then on your nose, your mouth, and your hand as you held the starwheel. Do you remember what time it was? Was it winter? A Monday, or maybe just a dream?

HS: Would have been pulling into Salado, TX right then, an oasis between Prairie Dell and Belton, late Spring, 2016. There is a 14% chance it was a Monday. I was on the way to Fran & Donny’s house for the night. It was indeed dreamy, crossing Salado Creek on wooden wheels. This song by Garrett T. Capps was released exactly two years later. I know because the date is inscribed on the starwheel (Click Here)

VB: Isn’t backward enough to be forward? Isn’t memory an altered state? What would the future be without a rearview mirror?

HS: This might be a candidate for “some of them seem to find answers in your drawings themselves.”

VB: Please tell me, what were the diamonds you found in Diamondville? Was there a golden ray at El Dorado? Did you get the chance to see it? Is it in Eureka, where everything began, or halfway? Did you lose something in Waterloo?

HS: Like you said, in the drawings.

VB: Why are these towns transparent to the eyes that see them as examples of classified misery? I think I can see beyond that in your drawings.

HS: Misery Repair takes different forms.

VB: As Flaneurs, isn't being lost what we need to be? Aren't we creating an altered/alternated reality?

HS: In a word, Yep.

VB: An invitation: I want to alter the 'Altered States' through sound I’m going backward on your 15 places but reading as in Spanish sounds. Would you do it in English?

gnihtoN

yppaH

aznanoB

ellivdnomaiD

erehwoN

sgnirpS tsoL

esulceR

enotseyK

ytinutroppO

nedE

akeruE

ellivremmuB

secneuqesnoC ro hturT

odaroD lE

oolretaW

HS: I recited them 19 times. Delightful. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve been carrying around a sign that says “Erewhon is almost nowhere backwards” since 1969.

Karla Milosevich, Artist, Community Organizer, Santa Fe, NM

Karla Milosevich: What was the best party you ever went to?

HS: Remember, I lived in San Antonio for a long time, so it would be impossible to narrow it down.

KM: Does your life imitate art or does your art imitate life?

HS: Walking is similar to drawing.

KM: Dad said your drawings are like haiku's. If you feel inspired, write a haiku about one of them.

HS: I was drawing with

Don Diego on my lap

this is the last one

KM: Who would you want to play you in the movie of your life? Haha

HS: Parker Posey

Celia Álvarez Muñoz, artist, Arlington, TX

“Parts of a Whole”

Upon first seeing/reading this project, it

made me think of the time I was trying to recall the name of an actress that just would not surface.

I vividly saw in my mind’s eye, parts of two of her movie roles.

Into sharp focus were snippets of her mood and voice delivery, body language.

I tried to zero in on different aspects of her role and dialogue.

The intonation of her lines and the facial characteristics she employed.

Her attire clearly depicted. The other actors in those scenes. But her name just wouldn’t surface.

Tempted to look her up, online, using the movie titles, I resisted.

But realizing I had not employed a strategy I often resort to, to recall things forgotten

which works really well for me, is a nonsense association of sorts.

Since the reality wouldn’t yield me the answer,

I relinquished the agony and googled it up.

There!

Instantly, upon reading it, my mind automatically gave me a good association with obvious similarities.

Hers, and another actress’s, last name.

Plus, the roles they had played.

Both pronouncedly tragic females.

One, an historical southern belle reaped of her social status by the Civil War.

The other a sheared horror victim, during the Cold War.

It all came together.

The names, now, indelibly in my mind.

Were clues the remnants or the remnants the clues?

Submitted by Celia Álvarez, 11/13/2024

P.S.: This body of work quickly reminded me of the first of Hills’ works, I saw, expressing a big shift in content & form when he was studying with Frances Colpitt.

Plexiglass and Happy Faces!

For me, having access to a scintilla of his life experiences served as connections to the work.

For him, it must have made sense because he had lived and acquired clues that referred him to this new experimentation. I rejoiced his leap.

Sense or nonsense association?

-Celia

'Altered States (Part Eight)' continues at Phil Space, 1410 2nd Street, Santa Fe, through January 31.

Altered States Q&A, Part One, 2020, on the Art Report Today: Click Here

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