A relative newcomer to Colorado, artist Christine Nguyen arrived from California with a résumé that boasts an international reach and a mixed-media practice as big as the cosmos that inspires her.

It’s a time when we all at least for a moment believe in bewitchment, when dimensions slip their boundaries, life and death aren’t so far apart, and fabulous costumes rule the days and nights.

Photography has, from its earliest decades, proved a useful ally to naturalists as a method for documenting specimens. In the case of photograms, which created records of whatever was placed on the ...