A hallucinatory collision of national mythologies, Manifest Fucking Destiny fuses Ansel Adams’ image of Yellowstone’s Castle Geyser—once deployed as a symbol of preserved American wilderness—with the famous photo of Buzz Aldrin on the moon, flag firmly planted. Painted in layered stages—first a ghostly monochrome underpainting, then a desaturated sky, then veils of toxic green, blue, and magenta glazes—the work confronts the entwined legacies of Manifest Destiny, environmental exploitation, and Cold War conquest. Whatley reanimates these symbols not as triumphs, but as unstable mirages, revealing the poisoned seams beneath the American sublime. This portal doesn’t just reframe landscape painting—it opens a psychic rift into the collective fantasy of territorial purity, asking: what does it mean to claim land, even land that breathes steam or circles above us?