Julian Whatley’s A Moment in Spacetime at Devil’s Tower (Mato Tipila) is a portal through which time, myth, science, and American history converge. Appropriating an 1892 survey photograph of the sacred monolith—first mapped by the U.S. Geological Survey and mistranslated as “Devils Tower”—the painting layers a Pleistocene mastodon, a Cold War flying saucer, and a matrix of luminous geometric frames derived from a 1933 Japanese color dictionary. These elements, seemingly disparate, coexist in an extra-dimensional reality governed not by chronology but by resonance.

Within this painting, the core tenets of the Peripheral Space movement are vividly realized: luminosity of meaning (a dense network of cultural, geological, and cinematic references), analogue astonishment (virtuosic oil handling and painterly layering of historical visual styles), and interconnectivity (bridging Indigenous cosmology, quantum physics, cinematic symbolism, and colonial cartography). The result is both a re-enchantment of landscape and a metaphysical act of unmapping—a refusal of singular narrative and an embrace of multiversal simultaneity.

A Moment in Spacetime is not just a painting; it is a proposition: that to see clearly, we must see diagonally, relationally, and across epochs. That art, at its most charged, doesn’t represent reality—it pierces it.