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photo-eye Gallery is excited to announce that Showcase artist Edward Bateman is among the winners of the Earth Photo 2021 prize! The featured image is from At Home in the West, a new portfolio that we’re thrilled to premier on our website.
Edward Bateman is a Salt Lake City-based artist and educator whose practice explores natural processes and figures through photography and printmaking. In At Home in the West, Bateman reconstructs natural landmarks of the western United States with a 3D printer. Massive, awe-inspiring forms, such as those of Yosemite National Park, are rendered to the scale of his kitchen table. He pairs these models with a smoke machine to create haunting, atmospheric photographs that merge the genres of still life and landscape.
This inversion of the way that we normally interact with big landscapes as small humans creates a strange and playful tension in Bateman’s images. This sense of tension and his unorthodox approach to landscape photography caught the attention of judges at Earth Photo 2021, who declared Half Dome in Winter No. 3, 2021 the winner for the category of “Place” in this year’s competition.
One of the goals of Earth Photo is to “showcase the best in environmental visual media” and Bateman’s representation of one of Yosemite’s most popular and recognizable landmarks is just that.
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| Edward Bateman, Half Dome in Winter No. 3, 2021, archival pigment print, 20" x 20", edition of 6, $1200 |
Earth Photo 2021 is a project of Forestry England the the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). About Half Dome in Winter No. 3, the director of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), Professor Joe Smith, said:
The image at first sight is quite playful, but I must admit that I find it unsettling. [Bateman] is playing off of the art-historical concept of the sublime, but reading it through the lens of the difficult new knowledge of human caused climate change and biodiversity loss...though [this image shows that] big ideas can be created from small, difficult spaces of opportunity.
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| Professor Joe Smith in front of Edward Bateman's Half Dome in Winter No. 3, click here to watch the video in its entirety! |
At Home in the West is available for viewing in its entirety on our website! Below are some selections from this recent portfolio.
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| Edward Bateman, Shiprock No. 5, 2021, archival pigment print, 10 x 15”, Edition of 5, $875 |
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| Edward Bateman, Zion No. 6, 2021, archival pigment print, 10 x 10”, Edition of 5, $740 |
Edward Bateman’s earlier work centered on re-creating and modifying objects from the photographic past through digital manipulation. However, this work is consistent with Bateman’s return to working with the physical object, as the artist has said about his series, Reversing Photosynthesis, previously featured by photo-eye:
For nearly two decades, my work has used constructed and often anachronistic imagery to create alleged historical artifacts that examine our belief in the photograph as impartial witness. Although some elements in that work depict real objects, many have never had a tangible physical existence – they are three-dimensionally modeled completely inside the world of a computer. They are ghosts made of nothing more substantial than numbers.
This new series represents a return to my roots and to those of photography. While I continue to construct many of my images, these works are a new direction; one that reflects both my own aging process and mortality. For me, this is a shift from the virtual to the tangible as perhaps a way to hang onto the fleeting substance of life.
See more from At Home in the West here, or revisit Edward Bateman’s Reversing Photosynthesis here. To hear Edward Bateman speak directly to his work about Yosemite, listen to our photo-eye Conversation between the artist and Gallery Director, Anne Kelly!
Contact photo-eye Gallery with inquiries about Edward Bateman’s work.
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All prices listed were current at the time this post was published.
For more information, and to purchase prints, please contact Gallery Director Anne Kelly or Gallery Assistant Delaney Hoffman, or you may also call us at 505-988-5152 x202