Mountain Standard Time
DENVER | 06.05.2026 - 08.30.2026 | 6:00pm
Artists: Grace Kennison, Ryan Scheer, Tim Rickett, Epiphany Couch, Justin Giunta, Justin Colt Beckman, Erika Osborne, Jesse Albrecht, Jed Webster Smith, Chelsea Kaiah, Kelly Moran, Mona Cliff, Jess Kellner, Ellen Moses, Wendy Klemperer, Eleanor Foy, Charlie-Anne Hopkins
Grab your spurs and perhaps your smartphone—as Visions West Contemporary proudly presents Mountain Standard Time. This summer group show is something between high-noon showdown between the dusty myths of the past and the "messy-on-purpose" reality of the modern West. From Epiphany Couch, whose work directly dismantles the romanticized tropes of Manifest Destiny by replacing colonial myths with Indigenous presence, sovereignty, and ecological reciprocity to Tim Rickett, whose work attacks the same myth with a scalpel of sharp irony, pop-culture humor, and plastic toys. He targets the hyper-masculine, commercialized "Hollywood West," exposing just how flimsy, constructed, and ultimately ridiculous the colonial cowboy trope truly is. For over two decades, Visions West has operated under a sharp thesis: the West is no longer a physical frontier to be conquered, but a fraught psychological container where nature, artifice, and historical memory collide. In Mountain Standard Time, a vibrant cohort of artists dismantles the shopworn romanticism of Terra Nullius—the colonial myth that this land was a vacant, pristine playground waiting for white settlers—and replaces it with a landscape that feels destabilized, modern, and profoundly alive.