Unsettled Lands by Manette Rene Bradford

Unsettled Lands is a body of work that engages with traditional themes in visual culture from the mythic American West; of both landscape as subject, and landscape in relationship with legendary Western themes of masculinity, heroism, mastery, and stewardship over the land. The works are a series of watercolor, paper, and acrylic collages on canvas, works on paper, and ceramic sculptures, primarily rendered in raw sepia. This pigment (though now synthesized, was originally derived from melanin in cuttlefish ink) references both the organic nature of the body and the early photography of the 19th century and the Old West. The monochromaticity of the work also eliminates the distinction between the matter of the body and that of the landscape. While the images may engage with a specific geographic location, they imagine an allegorical historical narrative for each terrain and exist outside of a historic chronology. In an effort to unearth the legacy that is left from the act of settlement and the impulse behind the act of possession, the work references a motif found in various creation mythologies of the immolation and dismemberment of a primordial figure to build a new cosmos, essentially reimagining a creation mythology for the American West. My monolithic male figures are nude, exposed, eroded, and vulnerable, in contrast with the iconic, hypermasculine figure of legend found in the heroic frontiersman, rancher, cowboy, or outlaw. Though the inflation of the figurative scale imitates the grandiosity of the determination of will to dominate, tame, and take possession of the land, the work offers a contradictory narrative and hints at a different motivation: a desire to meld, absorb, enmesh with the land.