HILLS SNYDER
“ALTERED STATES (PART EIGHT)”
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 conditions and emotions float in a country of association.
Beginning in Nowhere, Oklahoma, the artist plotted his route through Happy, Texas; Bonanza, Colorado, and Lost Springs, Wyoming to get to a residency at the Ucross Foundation where the first fifty drawings were produced. There were side trips to Recluse, Wyoming; Keystone, South Dakota, and Opportunity, Montana. At the end of the residency, the project continued through Diamondville, Wyoming; Eden, Utah; Eureka, Nevada; Bummerville, California; Nothing, Arizona; Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; Eldorado, Texas; Waterloo, Kansas; Lost Nation, Iowa; Downer, Minnesota; Donnybrook, North Dakota, and Funk, Nebraska.
From thousands of photographs taken along the route, two hundred drawings have been made. An eight-part serial narrative has appeared in Glasstire. 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 drawings exist somewhere between representation, quantum fantasy, and sheer love of drawing. There are sometimes events in the drawings that signal some sort of grapple with depiction, but what they may reveal lies outside the base locations except maybe as a quantum fantasy. Quantum because it can’t be seen, fantasy because Snyder is pretending it can. 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 anywhere.
This show runs through December 31, 2024