JULIAN WHATLEY

Psychotropic Portals is not an exhibition in the traditional sense. It’s a cinematic fever dream, a painterly séance, and a quantum tumbleweed ride through the American mythos. In his first solo exhibition at Gallery 33, artist Julian Whatley draws from his decades-long career as a director of photography to choreograph a multi-sensory, narrative-driven experience that collapses the boundaries between viewer, painting, and performance.

At the center of the show are Whatley’s luminous oil paintings—dreamlike interventions into the iconography of the American West. Layered geometric color fields and surreal insertions (flying saucers, mastodons, stealth bombers) rework the imagery of conquest, masculinity, and manifest destiny. Some paintings are based on 150-year-old photographic plates; others are culled from the flickering memory bank of classic Hollywood Westerns. All are embedded with a sense of distortion: history as hallucination.

But painting is only the entry point.

Opening night activates the full spectrum of Whatley’s vision. A massive video wall recontextualizes archival film clips—spotlighting only the female characters from classic Westerns, while graphic overlays erase the men. Performers roam the gallery: an 1860s cowboy, a saloon singer, a ghostly 1950s Kid Cowboy, and a Cosmic Cowboy channeling transmissions from an alternate timeline. The effect is part immersive theater, part speculative history, and part quantum ritual.

Beneath the theatricality lies a conceptual framework—Peripheral Space, a new artistic movement Whatley is both practicing and attempting to define. Grounded in three guiding principles—Luminosity of Meaning, Analogue Astonishment, and The Principle of Interconnectedness—Peripheral Space offers an antidote to digital detachment, misinformation, and the isolating effects of algorithmic life.

“Art doesn’t need to be looked at straight on,” Whatley explains. “Sometimes, meaning emerges from the edges.”

Peripheral Space demands that we return to the tangible, the communal, and the mysterious. It calls for:

Luminosity of Meaning: Visual clarity, informational reliability, shared reality—rejecting the erosion of truth in favor of recognizable iconography and fractals of interpretation.

Analogue Astonishment: Multisensory, non-virtual works that exist in physical space and time—art as a richer, real-world alternative to the digital ephemera of our phones.

The Principle of Interconnectedness: A call to re-engage with others through embodied, meaningful experiences—art as a curative to the narcissism of self-curated silos.

“Art is a public service,” Whatley adds. “It’s not a commodity or a commercial good. Patrons are not customers. They’re custodians—caretakers and collaborators.”

With Psychotropic Portals, Julian Whatley invites viewers not just to witness an exhibition, but to inhabit a new dimension—one where meaning glows at the periphery, and connection is a form of resistance.