Godzilla, 2024, brings together American military history, Japanese cinema, and Western iconography in a visceral meditation on the atomic age and the narratives nations create to justify violence. At the painting’s center is a stark depiction of the first atomic bomb detonation at Los Alamos, rendered in a limited palette of lead white and lamp black. The cloud’s billowing form—thick with impasto and visibly reworked—evokes a force that is both geological and manmade, with flashes of the underlying crimson ground suggesting blood, heat, and irreversible rupture.

Scraped, sanded, and repainted across multiple sessions, the surface pulses with unstable energy, mirroring the volatility of radiation and the psychic residue of war. Into this charged American landscape, Whatley inserts a fragment of Japanese postwar memory: the katakana characters ゴジラ (Gojira), referencing the 1954 film in which a nuclear-born monster rampages through Tokyo—a cinematic metaphor for trauma, loss, and collective reckoning.

The juxtaposition of these visual systems—mid-century Americana and Japanese pop-cultural horror—complicates official histories. While the dominant U.S. narrative casts the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as tragic necessities, Godzilla poses unsettling questions: What traumas remain unacknowledged? Whose grief goes unrecorded? And how do the stories we tell obscure the human cost of technological might?

In this work, Whatley turns the canvas into both a historical document and a philosophical field, where myths collide and suppressed truths rise to the surface.