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alteredstates/alteredscapes is a three-pronged, collaborative photography project from Natalie Christensen (Santa Fe, NM) and Jim Eyre (London, UK) that uses Instagram to engage a global audience. Referencing a 1980’s horror film in which the main character gets lost in visual dreamscapes via sensory deprivation experiments, alteredstates/alteredscapes aims to make public and visible the psychological impact of sharing and viewing art on social media.
Christensen and Eyre met over Instagram and initiated a collaboration based on their shared ambivalence of using the social media platform to view and share contemporary photography. alteredstates/alteredscapes was born from the artists’ main question: Is the unrelenting momentum of the virtual space stifling their creativity or, conversely, are they becoming better artists by the pressure to produce and compete for recognition on the digital stage?
The project is comprised of composite photography of New Mexico and London. To create the final photographs, the artists began passing their respective photographs—shots of their urban surroundings—back and forth via Instagram direct message. At each turn, the artists digitally cropped, collaged, or otherwise altered the images, shaping them by trial and error, layer upon layer. As a result, the images contain familiar tropes yet are oddly disorienting—architectural fragments and street elements meld together to present multiple points of view and subtle combinations of perspectives on a single visual plane, representing a malleable psychological experience.
Natalie has shown her work in exhibitions around the world, including London, Berlin, New York, and Los Angeles. She was one of five invited photographers for “The National: Best of Contemporary Photography” at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and was recently named one of “Ten Photographers to Watch” at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of museums and institutions as well as numerous private collections. Natalie is represented by Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe, Nordic Art Agency in Malmo, Sweden, Susan Spiritus Gallery in Newport Beach, and Galerie Minimal in Berlin. When Natalie isn’t looking for photos behind forgotten shopping centers you can find her checking her Instagram feed while hiking the mountains around Santa Fe.
