Altered States in the Acid West brings together twenty contemporary artists who reconsider the stories, symbols, and cinematic language that have shaped ideas of the American West. Drawing inspiration from the “acid western”—a countercultural film subgenre that emerged in the 1970s—the exhibition explores how familiar frontier imagery can be distorted, reframed, or undone to challenge long-held assumptions about the region.

Acid westerns disrupted polished narratives of Manifest Destiny, treating the West not as a place of inevitable progress but as unstable, dreamlike terrain. Building on this legacy, the exhibition brings together works across film, photography, sculpture, and installation that engage the West as both a physical landscape and a cultural projection.

The artists examine the frontier as promised land and contested ground, symbol of freedom and site of extraction, magnet for belief, myth, and the supernatural. Rather than presenting a singular story, Altered States in the Acid West considers the West as an evolving landscape shaped by imagination, belief, and competing histories—one that remains unresolved and continually reimagined.