{"id":101287,"date":"2026-01-26T14:15:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T21:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=101287"},"modified":"2026-02-25T17:32:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T00:32:12","slug":"umocas-altered-states-depicts-a-vivid-far-out-american-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/umocas-altered-states-depicts-a-vivid-far-out-american-west\/","title":{"rendered":"UMOCA’s “Altered States” Depicts a Vivid, Far-Out American West"},"content":{"rendered":"

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July Guzman, “Flying Over Muir Woods,” 2024, oil on canvas<\/p><\/div>\n

At the turn of the 20th century, the American West came vividly into focus in the public imagination, shaped by a flourishing body of romantic representation circulated through poetry, illustration, travel writing, and popular media. Among the voices helping to define this picturesque vision was Henry Herbert Knibbs, a Canadian poet born in 1874 and widely regarded as a forebear of the Western genre. Knibbs encountered the West initially as a visitor, struck by its vast scale and elemental beauty, as well as by what he perceived as the dignity and simplicity of rural life in remote settlements. In “The Lone Red Rock,” he evokes the region as \u201ca song of the range, an old-time song, to the patter of pony\u2019s feet,\u201d inviting readers to \u201cfollow me out where the cattle graze, where the morning shadows fall, on the far, dim trails of outland ways that lead through the chaparral \/ there, where the red butte stands alone, and the brush dies down to sand.\u201d His poetry binds dramatic landscapes to cowboy culture, ranching, and agrarian rhythms, presenting the West as both sublime and deeply livable. This romantic framing resonated with the preservationist spirit of the early 1900s, particularly under Theodore Roosevelt, when conservation policy helped formalize an image of the West as majestic, spiritually resonant, and worthy of protection\u2014while also encouraging travel, tourism, and public engagement through accessible, idealized visions of the land.<\/h4>\n

On view at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art through June 6, Altered States in the Acid West<\/i> takes this legacy of wonder as a point of departure, expanding and reimagining familiar portrayals of the region through a wide-ranging and technically accomplished selection of works by artists from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. The exhibition acknowledges the long-standing association between the Western landscape and awe or spiritual searching\u2014the brochure notes its engagement with \u201cvast, sparsely populated landscapes [that] draw spiritual seekers and fuel enduring mythologies that mirror America\u2019s past and present\u201d\u2014while opening space for new, unsettled, and psychedelic perspectives. Drawing on the Acid Western, a genre that emerged in the 1970s alongside countercultural movements, Altered States<\/i> revisits the West as a terrain shaped by layered histories, contested narratives, and unresolved violence. Rather than rejecting myth outright, the exhibition reworks it, emphasizing how representations of the West have been continually constructed and revised. As the brochure observes, \u201cinstead of presenting the West as a place of destiny or conquest, acid westerns depict the West as unstable terrain: disorienting, visionary, and charged with meaning beyond what can be easily named.\u201d<\/h4>\n

The show gives ample space to work that is visually immersive, and openly celebratory, and the deconstructive antagonism toward simple romantic notions never crowds out the experience of looking. Instead, the exhibition\u2019s real strength lies in the strange and often powerful sensations produced by the work itself. Rather than discarding the West\u2019s spiritual and visual charge, the works on view move between affirmation and interrogation, allowing beauty, intensity, and unease to coexist. One piece that participates more fully in a traditional depiction of the West is July Guzman\u2019s “Flying Over Muir Woods.” The painting presents a glowing, high-intensity sunset, with the lower third of the canvas reduced to a dark silhouette that cedes attention to the sky above. An expansive field of expertly gradated oil paint shifts from saturated oranges into soft lilacs at the top of the composition, creating an enveloping sense of atmosphere and light that rewards sustained viewing. The work\u2019s reference to John Muir situates it within a longer lineage of preservationist thought, echoing Muir\u2019s vision of wilderness as spiritually restorative while allowing the painting\u2019s visual force to speak for itself.<\/h4>\n

Surrealism and altered perception are used to disrupt familiar ways of seeing, creating room for histories, beliefs, and landscapes. In Margaret R. Thompson\u2019s “Venidero” (2025), a spiraling form extends from a mountain, while a moon, sun, and yellow flower anchor the scene in a diamond-shaped composition that draws the elements of the landscape into symbolic alignment. Executed in oil with collected earth, mica, raw pigment, and temple oil on linen, the work\u2019s materiality reinforces its symbolic charge, suggesting a landscape understood not only through sight but through ritual, belief, and accumulated meaning.<\/h4>\n