Altered States

2009–2025

Altered States is a collection of images suspended somewhere between cinema, memory and emotional extremity.

The series takes its atmosphere from an imagined history of cult films, arthouse theaters and half-remembered black-and-white movies: worlds populated by sharply dressed people behaving in ways that are anything but composed.

Across the images, ordinary states begin to rupture. People scream, laugh, cry, feed, thirst, collapse, contort, surrender and appear momentarily overtaken by something larger than their usual selves.

The work is less interested in any single emotion than in the point where emotion becomes physical. Pleasure can resemble panic, grief can resemble ecstasy, and exhaustion, desire, fear and relief can become difficult to distinguish from one another.

There is a cinematic logic to the world, but no fixed film behind it. Images appear more like fragments from stories that may never have existed, carrying traces of melodrama, cult cinema, psychological disorientation and the fantastic without settling completely into any of them.

Bodies, landscapes and occasional objects all participate in the same instability. Reality remains recognizable, but something within it has shifted.

Altered States continues to collect those moments when composure gives way and ordinary experience becomes strange, heightened or briefly unknowable.