Altered States draws from the acid western genre that emerged in the 1970s alongside countercultural movements and a growing distrust of inherited histories. These films upended the familiar language of the Western—its heroes, landscapes, and myths—through surreal imagery, psychedelia, and spiritual inquiry. Instead of presenting the West as a place of destiny or conquest, acid westerns depict it as unstable terrain: disorienting, visionary, and charged with meaning beyond what can be easily named.
For generations, the American West has been imagined and reimagined as many things at once: a promised land full of Manifest Destiny; a symbol of rugged individualism; a site of paranormal speculation; and a resource to be conquered, extracted, and consumed. Altered States in the Acid West examines these layered projections, asking how they were built, why they persist, and framing the West as a complex site of encounters—between people and land, belief and myth, and the visible and unseen.
The exhibition also grapples with the deeper histories embedded in the region: the impacts of colonization, racial violence, and cultural erasure. These legacies are not relics of the past, but human experiences that continue to shape the political and social realities of the West today. Vast, sparsely populated landscapes have allowed isolation and extremism to flourish; simultaneously, these places draw spiritual seekers and fuel enduring mythologies that mirror America’s past and present.
Bringing together Indigenous practices, cultural and spiritual traditions, histories of extraction, and critical re-readings of Western lore, Altered States invites viewers to sit with contradiction, uncertainty, and possibility— to consider what the American West has been, and what it might still become.
Featured Artists
Ileana Alarcón
Janna Avner
Will Bruno
Phillip Cash Cash (Nez Perce, Cayuse)
Paula Castillo
Russel Albert Daniels
Drew Dodge
Jim Frazer
July Guzman
Levi Jackson
Jim Mangan
Daryl Celeste Meador
Diego Medina
Martín Nuñez
Sarah M. Rodriguez
Jonathan Ryan
Shelby Shadwell
Rick Silva
Gilmore Scott
Margaret R. Thompson
Dani Tull
José Villalobos
Emmi Whitehorse
