The Battery is the neighbourhood at the southernmost tip of Manhattan, and though this artwork provides neither a conventional nor a realistic picture of the city, it is an unabashedly figurative painting.

The meaning of the painting emerges as the viewer “reads” the sequence of images beginning in the top left corner, and the montage of close-up and distanced views creates an impression of events occurring across time and place. Wieland is willing to borrow from pop-culture forms—comic books, animation, and cinematic storyboards—to create a new kind of narrative painting.