PSYCHEDELIC

Opening Reception: JUNE 13, 6-10 pm

When most people hear the word psychedelic art, they probably conjure an image of some sort of sixties era rock poster in their mind full of swirling letterforms and bright colors. Although, that would be an apt example of psychedelic art, isn’t there more to it than that? For an art allegedly inspired by mind-expanding drugs, doesn’t that range of vision seem a bit narrow? The word psychedelic is made up from the Greek words for soul (psyche) and manifest (delos) and didn’t come into use until 1957 when coined by psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond as an alternative descriptor for hallucinogenic drugs in the context of psychotherapy. Of course, human beings have been having “soul manifesting” experiences long before the field of psychiatry tried to explain them or street drugs were available to induce them. Not only have we humans been having these experiences for thousands of years, but we’ve been making art attempting to describe these experiences for just as long. This month at Tangent, forty years after Woodstock, we endeavor to offer an updated version of “psychedelic art” and perhaps to widen the range of what psychedelic art looks like. These artists, to our knowledge, do not use psychedelic drugs to foster their creativity but I would argue that their visions seek to express the unseen aspects of our existence, change our perceptions of what we see before us or invite us into their own private world of creative exuberance.

PSYCHEDELIC: Christian Gipper, Gabe Sanford, Paul Candy and Kyle Johnson

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