Degree Date

2025

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

History of Art

Abstract

This dissertation triangulates the complex relationships among materiality, place, and history in works of contemporary landscape. I analyze three case studies: Sally Mann’s photographs of the American South, Mark Bradford’s iconoclastic paintings after the Gettysburg Cyclorama, and Tacita Dean’s film of the Great Salt Lake. I contend that these contemporary works of art are capacious in their temporal and narrative reach, holding multifaceted histories of America, including those of environment, war, oppression, and extraction. A key part of my thesis is that by looking at how these works were made and what they are made of—their materials, places, and processes—we can recognize an epistemology that emerges beyond representation.

In this dissertation, I propose an expanded category of landscape. While the artists I discuss engage with specific places, their aim is not to “capture” an accurate likeness, but to evoke the site’s stratified histories. Towards that end, the projects I examine push against legibility, sitting uneasily between abstraction and representation, and muddying standard chronologies of American history. Building on Henri Bergson’s notion of heterogeneous time, I argue that these artists’ material experiments unfix histories of place. While the past informs how we can understand these works of art, they also change how we understand the past.

My first chapter on Sally Mann focuses on her landscape projects Mother Land (1992– 96), Deep South (1998–99), and Last Measure (2000–03). I argue that her photographs engage with histories of agriculture, slavery, violence, and war through Mann’s adoption of errors, ii i mistakes, and imperfections in the negatives. Chapter two investigates layers of reproduction and destruction in Mark Bradford’s Pickett’s Charge (2017), examining the project’s relationship to advertising and spectacle, the American myths of the Lost Cause and white reunion, and the history of interpretation and memory at the Gettysburg battlefield. My final chapter explores how Tacita Dean’s non-narrative film JG (2013) folds together multiple temporalities, sites, and sources. Attending to Dean’s experimental methods, I trace the film’s relationship to nineteenth-century exploration narratives, to non-linear time, and to the future as the Great Salt Lake’s current megadrought puts it in ecological peril.

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