{"id":25783,"date":"2014-06-04T23:35:14","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T05:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=25783"},"modified":"2018-12-20T16:24:14","modified_gmt":"2018-12-20T22:24:14","slug":"edward-bateman-artist-profile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/edward-bateman-artist-profile\/","title":{"rendered":"Edward Bateman: Artist Profile"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ed Bateman in his office at the University of Utah. Photo by Simon Blundell<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I<\/span>still have a card on my refrigerator from Phillips Gallery from 2005 that I am not ready to stop looking at \u2014 a computerized montage on Ralph Waldo Emerson by Edward Bateman with an Albert Einstein quotation: \u201cThe most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.\u00a0It is the source of all true art and science.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Bateman, 52, notes in his brief\u00a015 Bytes<\/em>\u00a0artist\u2019s biography that as a child of \u201cwhat was then called the Space Age\u201d he was torn between being a scientist or an artist, which is why the quote is so apropos. The computer, he writes, \u201callowed him to split the difference,\u201d and in 1983 he began using it to create images. So while at age 9 or so he was faking photos of flying saucers, and as an undergraduate was doing fake UFO shots complete with handwritten eyewitness testimony (you can see a pattern forming here), by the early \u201890s he was working professionally in the field of digital imaging and now teaches and lectures internationally on the subject. His biggest surprise, he writes, was discovering that the tools he thought \u201cwould direct his thinking to the future have led him to contemplate the art of the past.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Take the nineteenth-century\u00a0cartes de visite<\/em>, that were made in the millions and exchanged among friends \u2014 sort of the Facebook of the day, Bateman says (they were put in books that \u201ccontained all your friends as well as cards of celebrities, entertainers, generals and so forth that you could purchase to round out a collection\u201d) \u2014 they have led him to endless hours of fascination and manipulation.<\/h4>\n

A lot has happened during the nine years since I stuck that card on the fridge. Bateman received the Salt Lake City Mayor\u2019s Award in 2008 for his contributions to the arts, and his work was seen at Ken Sanders Rare Books in conjunction with\u00a0Mechanical Brides of the Uncanny,<\/em>\u00a0a book of his images published by Nazraeli Press in 2009. He has participated in exhibitions in the UK, Germany, Poland, Hong Kong, Belgium, China, Finland, Lithuania, Canada, New Zealand and various locations throughout the United States. He no longer works retouching photos at Borge Andersen; instead, he is assistant professor at the University of Utah where he teaches art in the Photography\/Digital Imaging program and received a prestigious Early Career Teaching Award in 2012.<\/h4>\n

The artist opens in a two-person show June 20 \u2013 July 11 at Phillips on the main floor with John Erickson. This is his fifth exhibit at the destination gallery on 200 South.<\/h4>\n

Much of his new work will be different than we are used to seeing, which makes Bateman a bit uneasy. As he has told his students, \u201cGoing to a gallery opening is like being invited to a party where you will be the only person in their underwear. It can be a very vulnerable feeling.\u201d<\/h4>\n

\u201cBut I also tell students to value that vulnerability. That feeling is a sign of growth. It is what drives you to do your best; to keep trying. If you aren\u2019t anxious, then you aren\u2019t challenging yourself \u2014 and you aren\u2019t caring deeply. And once that feeling goes away, maybe you\u2019ve stopped making real art.\u201d<\/h4>\n

He believes that if you listen, your work will tell you what to do next. \u201cIf you keep working on a project, if you keep getting into it, you get to know it better and start to understand it and then it all kind of comes together. Like the robots. I mean, doesn\u2019t\u00a0this<\/em>\u00a0sound intellectual \u2014 take the people out of pictures and put robots in their place. But it really served me well. Sometimes you have to trust the voice.\u201d<\/h4>\n

He has what he terms \u201cquirky\u201d things scattered about the studio:\u00a0 a meteorite; a \u201cconceptual\u201d brick from Saltgrass printmaker Stefanie Dykes (wrapped in brown paper and labeled \u201cBRICK\u201d); a clay voodoo doll being kept moist in the sink; a cross on the bulletin board by Art Access artist Vojko Rizvanovic; and one that really stands out for him \u2014 Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt\u2019s cards that are \u201csort of the\u00a0I Ching\u00a0<\/em>for artists.\u201d\u00a0 Titled\u00a0Oblique Strategies: One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas<\/em>, they say things like \u201cGo to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place\u201d; \u201cWould anybody want it?\u201d; \u201cSimply a matter of work\u201d; \u201cWhen is it for?\u201d; and a favorite of Bateman\u2019s: \u201cHonor thy error as a hidden intention.\u201d He explains, \u201cWhen you\u2019re in a project and you get stuck you can draw a card and do what it says.\u201d The deck is extremely worn.<\/h4>\n

You suspect that\u00a0he\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0going to be a little quirky from looking at his work (especially those automatons, his preferred term for the robots), but what doesn\u2019t come across is the puckish charm of the fellow: Ed Bateman is delightful. There apparently isn\u2019t much that doesn\u2019t please or interest him. He\u2019s into chocolate and books by John Barth and Haruki Murakami. He enjoys hiking. He doesn\u2019t have pets (too busy) but keeps a rather sad jade plant in his office and a bromeliad at home. Though somewhat shy, he values his role as mentor and the process of interacting with students in the classroom. And on a recent trip to New Orleans he visited a voodoo queen \u2014 not for a consultation on his future, but just to inquire about her general outlook on life.<\/h4>\n

He lost his father, a psychiatrist, when he was 13, but visits his mother, an English major and former administrative assistant, regularly to help with chores and so they can work crossword puzzles together. A teaching day begins when the alarm goes off at an odd time, 8:43 or 8:47 \u2013 never simply 8:45 \u2014 after Bateman has been up until 3 a.m. working on his art or creating a class assignment (usually both), while listening to the \u201cfunky\u201d online Radio Paradise, which he also treats his students to at the start of every class. He teaches from 10:45 a.m. until 5 p.m. then generally meets with students until 7 when he goes home for his dinner (a favorite is dinosaur-shaped chicken bites that he believes taste exactly like the extinct beasts) and a nap \u00a0before returning to the department at 11 to work through much of the night \u2014 generally (but not always) undisturbed. That\u2019s a pattern he got into as a graduate student and hasn\u2019t unlearned. He thinks that\u2019s the right time to make his images: \u201cIt\u2019s like the intellectual obligation side of me leaves and I can really get into listening to the work \u2014 it just sort of flows out at that point,\u201d he says. (He has maintained lately that two hours of making art equals one hour of sleep, but admits he may be wrong on this.)<\/h4>\n

Bateman usually works on two images at a time, in case he gets stuck, but typically only on one series. He might begin with a mental image, an idea, or even a really bad pun (he and U professor and artist Sam Wilson \u2014 famous for artistic puns \u2014 share a March 2nd birthday). The show at Phillips, Bateman explains, is tied in with a couple of key elements. One is blur. \u201cBlur was the last element of our visual vocabulary to be added. It wasn\u2019t until photography that blur became something that artists would use.\u201d The other element is \u201cpins and needles.\u201d The one with the really bad pun, he says, is \u201cA Camel and the Knee of an Idol.\u201d He likes to build \u201clittle detail things\u201d into his work. There\u2019s a postage stamp that will be in the image near the idol\u2019s knee with a camel on it that has the phrase: \u201cBeware the straw.\u201d Bateman quips, \u201cThat can be lethal to camels, I\u2019m told.\u201d A pun it must be confessed it took this writer a beat or two to catch.<\/h4>\n

One of Bateman\u2019s processes is that everything has to have a thread or a connection. \u201cBecause I don\u2019t make these things by setting up and taking a shot, I build and construct them.\u201d (And he does, over endless hours; able to see and work on just a single small element at a time on the computer screen.) Everything, he believes, should be in his work for a reason. \u00a0It all \u201chas a partner or a buddy or a pal or some kind of conceptual linkage that makes things connect,\u201d he says.<\/h4>\n

In \u201cTransformation,\u201d a girl in a carte de visite from the 1880s is dressed in a butterfly costume, so Bateman added a large butterfly on a chain. A butterfly, he explains, is an insect so you have other insects, ants, depicted in a living chain which is like the chain on the butterfly that is tethered to an eyelet, also a loop like the ants are in. \u201cSo I\u2019m playing with scale and the scale of things is sort of strange and that makes me think about Alice in Wonderland so that\u2019s why the bottle [depicted in the image] says \u2018Drink Me\u2019\u2014 the bottle is a container which is like a chrysalis which is why I have the chrysalis there which ties back in to the butterfly.\u201d There are three rocks in the image, actually the same rock, but he changed its size, rotated it and changed its position: because those are the three things you can do with an object in space. \u201cSo it\u2019s a great working strategy, to realize that everything has a partner, a connection, a reason. That\u2019s one of my theories. Each image goes through a different journey but there\u2019s always some little game \u2013 I guess I imagine that these things are in some sense real,\u201d Bateman muses.<\/h4>\n

While his work begins in his head and finishes on the computer, there\u2019s a lot to be done in between. \u201cThese are prints that I\u2019m working on for the show [that he has informally titled \u201cPins and Needles\u201d]. . . As I started to think about pins, pins are interesting. There\u2019s this yin-yang connection with pins. They destroy and mend and create at the same time. We hold things together with pins but they always leave a hole. So maybe there\u2019s a life lesson to be learned from pins. You can\u2019t pass through life without leaving marks but you should try to leave those marks as small as possible. Do some good on the plus side but do as little bad as possible. That\u2019s what pins and needles try to do.\u201d<\/h4>\n

He has one piece he created in clay, based on Botticelli\u2019s \u201cVenus,\u201d then wrapped with twine and stuck with T-shaped pins \u2013 the voodoo doll from the sink. \u201cI started to think about how we try to use ideas of beauty almost like a voodoo doll, how we try to pull them in and use them for our own purposes. Advertisements are a little like a voodoo doll, hoping to manipulate us into whatever they want. Our idea of beauty has suffered as a result.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Ed Bateman is modest about his art. \u201cIn some ways it all becomes reflections of what\u2019s already in you that may be misplaced, that you\u2019ve forgotten about that it\u2019s time to rediscover.\u00a0 . . . When everything comes together you can sit back and say, \u2018That came out of me?\u2019 It doesn\u2019t feel like something you did, it feels like something you participated in.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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Edward Bateman\u2019s new work will be on exhibit at\u00a0Phillips Gallery<\/a>\u00a0June 20 \u2013 July 11, with an artist reception during Gallery Stroll, Friday June 20, 6-9 pm.<\/p>\n

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Ed Bateman in his office at the University of Utah. Photo by Simon Blundell Istill have a card on my refrigerator from Phillips Gallery from 2005 that I am not ready to stop looking at \u2014 a computerized montage on Ralph Waldo Emerson by Edward Bateman with an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":844,"featured_media":25865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,14],"tags":[208,157],"class_list":["post-25783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artist_profiles","category-visual_arts","tag-edward-bateman","tag-phillips-gallery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/06\/edblog.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-06 17:19:48","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25783"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41155,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25783\/revisions\/41155"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}