“Unsettling the landscape: representation, appropriation,and indigenous aesthetics in the land art of the American Southwest” Ph.D. Dissertation by Yohana Agra Junker

Abstract: Representation of the landscape have been considered one of the most consequential subjects in Western visual arts for at least five centuries. When artists choose to delineate the landscape in their artistic productions, they participate in the ongoing history of shaping and interpreting our relationship with the physical environment. The way the re-present the land tells the story of how we have concomitantly framed, engaged, and abstracted our relationship to the natural world. This project provides a historical appraisal of imaginaries amalgamated in the landscape of the Southwest of the United States. Part of its objective is to bring to light that which has been submerged under the surface of the southwestern terrain via the aesthetic in order to demonstrate how some artistic production – such as the Land Art Movement are complicit in the colonial project.It also traces and documents how the Indigenous artistic productions in the US continue to offer counter-narrativesthat interrogate and interrupt the colonial project while protecting Native American life, histories, and land. Taken together, they disclose possibilities for questioning the troubled history of aesthetic representation and human intervention with the landscape while offering opportunities for engaging with the environment eco-critically, as a dynamic entity, in reciprocity, interdependence, and planetary emergence