California's vistas are already unreal; now imagine what they look like when you drop acid.

Oakland-based artist Terri Loewenthal melds landscape and psyche in her new series Psychscapes, a body of work that investigates the "sublime expanse of land and sky romanticized in the still-potent mythology of Utopian California."

The single-exposure, in-camera compositions use special optics designed by Loewenthal in order to compress sprawling swaths of terrain into the vivid environments you see depicted here. It's a journey into the psychology of perception, compressing space rather than time to throw off the normal orientation of a photograph—foreground and background blend, all of it swathed in striking, saturated hues for a beautiful hallucination. See the images IRL at Cult Gallery until April 21st, and in the slideshow below.

// Psychscapes (March 2-April 21), at Cult: Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, 1217 B Fell St. (Lower Haight), cultexhibitions.com, terriloewenthal.com.