Ben Aqua, Hunter, 2010

Perhaps most surrealistic of the group is the work of Ben Aqua, including a haunting photographic portrait of a man dressed in head-to-toe camouflage in the woods. Without seeing his face and the seamlessness of shifts from the man’s patterned clothing to the branches that surround him, the only human characteristic evident is his bright orange cap, without which we might mistake him for a semi-human woodland character from the X-Files.

Helen Maurene Cooper, Junknails with Jam and Mexican Cookie, 2009

Helen Maureen Cooper’s photographs of nail art follow in this investigation of pattern and its relationship to the body. In this case, Cooper’s large format color photographs focus on the elaborate decorations that define Chicago nail art styles, revealing the subtle influence of race and class.

Yumi Janairo Roth, In Situ Houston, 2009

The sculptures by Yumi Janairo Roth combine authoritarian objects that are usually associated with drab unadorned order with bright, shiny and festive decoration. Also included are photographs of these objects in particular sites. For instance, one image of a barricade as disco ball covered in mirrored mosaic is placed on street corner in front of a deadpan policeman.

Thomas Cummins, Unit B, 2010

The exhibition also includes works by William Betts with his pixilated paint fields on mirrors suggesting the surveillance of 747 jets as well as works by Thomas Cummins , Michael Eddy and Matthew Noel-Tod. All together, these works evoke strange uncanny combinations that are beautiful and wild.

Al Held, Eagle Rock III, 2000

The exhibition Psychedelic: Optical and Visionary Art Since the 1960’s at the San Antonio Museum of Art takes these ideas as a net to gather a wide range of artists. The 1960’s, as the well-worn story of post war America goes, was a moment of civil unrest driven by a youth culture that was suspect of authority and newly intoxicated by sex, drugs and rock and roll. It also was a time when artists were riffing on the newly invented methods of image making that Surrealism and hard edged abstraction introduced. As a result, artists such as Richard Anuszkiewicz and other Op Art innovators explored pattern and abstraction to create hallucinatory visual paintings.

Philip Taaffe’s Trinity (1985) extends these ideas from Op Art, creating an image with silkscreen and collage that makes one’s eyes buzz. The image makes us feel like we are falling into it and at the same time repelled by its churning space. Taaffe uses a color spectrum and concentric arrows of modulating scale to create a sense of movement that picks us up off our feet and drives us through the picture plane.

Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1987

Jack Goldstein - an artist who emerged in the 1980’s, disappeared from the art world in the 1990’s and then surfaced again to public acclaim in 2000 until his suicide in 2003– made images that used filmic and photographic sources for his paintings. Included in the exhibition is Untitled (1987), which uses a photograph of a spectacular moment in natural phenomena. Taken in space, the source image for this painting could be abstract but either way, the radiating degrees of hot pink that emanate from an electric blue ground construct a visual field that is arresting.

Fred Tomaselli, Ripple Trees, 1994

Another part of psychedelia that the exhibition’s curator David S Rubin seeks to distance himself from is drugs. But the exhibition does include Fred Tomaselli’s Ripple Trees (1994) combining pills and hemp leaves with paint and resin to construct an image of a landscape at dusk. This magical time of day – when trees and mountains are reduced to mere shadows against the soft glowing light on the horizon – is heightened by a web of luminous orbs that radiate pixilated color.

Jeremy Blake, Reading Ossie Clark, 2003

Shifting away from two dimensions, Jeremy Blake’s Reading Ossie Clark (2003) uses montage to combine short, barely legible clips of shot footage with highly saturated digital color. Each clip morphs into the next creating a dreamlike state of ecstasy. Using sculptural installation and an actual light show, Richie Budd’s Bon Voyage Somnabulating De Pileon (2010) builds on the psychedelic impulse to overwhelm the senses with a fog machine and an array of household items and gadgets. It also includes a sound piece that incorporates Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a communication model applied in psychotherapy that studies the structure of subjective experience.

Richi Budd, Bon Voyage Somnambulating De Pileon, 2007

Taken together, an exhibition about psychedelic experience in art is in many ways the most extreme exploration of radical forms of perception – something which is at the core of what Marcel Duchamp called “retinal art.” The best work in this show transcends the quaint utopianism of 1960’s psychedelics, choosing to change the way we see instead of changing the whole world.