It’s a cliche that most of us take for granted: light is the medium that enables us to see. In the dark we must grope; with light we can touch a thing, so to speak, from a distance. But light doesn’t always permit sight; in fact, often light prevents us from seeing. Take glare, for example. When the source of light is at a certain angle to the eye, glare near an object can effectively render it invisible. Or dapple, the glinting of light reflected off moving water that dazzles eye and mind. And speaking of water, what about when air bubbles or particles cause water to fill with light, until seeing through it becomes impossible? One way of thinking about Thea Schrack’s paintings, currently at the Julie Nester Gallery in Park City, is that in them she shows how light can simultaneously reveal the world and prevent seeing it clearly.

Schrack works primarily as a photographer, evidently producing commercial images in addition to regular exhibitions and special projects, such as capturing how the Czech Republic looked just after the expulsion of the Communist regime. Yet while recording all those surfaces, she may have become dissatisfied with the deceptive way the camera depicts the three-dimensional reality of light, leading her to cover certain photos with encaustic medium, usually a mixture of wax and resin. The prints she treats in this way are large enough to permit viewing them from across the room, at which point they look as their thumbnail copies do here: like conventional, albeit expertly produced pictures of bodies of water. But viewing at a distance is only one option. Most audiences will come up close, and it’s at arm’s length that they begin to show the reality from which we routinely build our notions, as opposed to our actual experiences, of the world around us.

Of course Schrack begins with photographs she has taken deliberately. In the current series, numbered iterations sharing the title ‘Time Rushing By,’ those photographs are all of streams or rivers bordered by trees and lush shrubbery, yet framed to include only moving water, with the presence of foliage outside the frame implied by reflections and shadows on its surface. The translucence of the wax layer, filled with light, reduces the contrast between what lies under the water’s surface, what’s on the surface, and what is reflected from above, so that they can easily become confused. Nor was that information invariably unambiguous to begin with: rather, interaction of moving water with light streaming through presumed openings on the invisible far shore conspire to produce an extravagance of visual information. Lacking cues or patterns with which to generalize the image, we become lost in pure sensation. Only by backing away can we reduce the sheer quantity of detail and begin to superimpose the patterns that normally allow us to ‘see‘ predictable objects. Faced with this challenge in the wild, we might squint to achieve a similar effect.

Of course Thea Schrack’s point isn’t just to teach a lesson in vision. She also wants her audience to see the places she’s photographed—the streams and their courses—more for what they really are: wild places we misjudge when we assume we know them. And she wants to remind us that while rushing water may be a workable allegory of passing time, time is also passing for the river, and for all the environment. Scientists are now all but convinced that water used to flow on Mars, the red desert planet. The events in Schrack’s encaustic photographs—virtually all of them—are rare, perhaps unique in the universe, and so may be the self-aware consciousness that allows us to stop, witness, and contemplate them.

Also on view at Julie Nester Gallery are paintings by Robert Denevan, whose approach contrasts strongly with Schrack’s. Where Schrack’s bodies of water are, at bottom, photographs of real places that we gaze into to see something timeless, Denevan’s horizontal bands of textured color represent no actual thing, but encourage us to find in them suggestions of certain places: specifically, evocations of the littoral—the zone of the planet’s surface where tidal waters border on solid ground, creating a realm that belongs permanently to neither. Before these panoramas we feel we are hovering over water, looking toward a shore that, instead of a dramatic upthrust of enduring rock, looks flat and seems on the verge of disappearing under the relentless erosion of the tides. Estuaries and deltas come to mind, as do marshes and mats of vegetation that sometimes form entire living islands. Either way, it’s important to keep in mind that these are ‘concrete’ images: ones we create in our minds, based on visual hints assembled from astute color applications, rather than abstracted from an actual scene.

At this point, it is worthwhile reviewing one of the themes of The Post. Ongoing studies of human vision points to the conclusion that little of what we encounter actually looks like what we believe we see. The sights that form in our minds are at best a compromise between what actually lies before our eyes at a given moment and what we have already experienced, and therefore expect to encounter again. In reality, the process of seeing is almost always far more complex even than that. In the case of landscapes like these, the eye encounters as least three horizontal bands that together cover the range of normal materials: a gas, a solid, and a liquid. Our brains project the sky onto an imaginary dome, envision the land as a receding plane, and give the water both surface and depth. These operations become so habitual that we do them even when the cues are really just horizontal bands of color. Doing this is physiologically pleasant enough that we do it even when we don’t have to. Then, depending on the circumstances, either we credit ourselves with accurate perception or vivid imagination. In reality, neither can be an isolated case of one or the other: perceiving requires imagination and imagining depends of a lifetime’s actual experience. Denevan’s achievement is to make his cues so convincing that we credit him for our share of the work as well as his.

Normally, a painter’s technique only matters at the level where it makes an expressive difference. Singer Sargent scrubs paint across a figure in a way that seems haphazard up close, but seen from eight feet away exactly captures the look of light reflected off silk. It’s of some interest in itself, but becomes important in contrast to the drops of white paint that Vermeer uses to suggest how reflections look when they come from a light source behind the subject, rather than behind the viewer. Vermeer’s placing of his subjects between the light source and his easel parallels Schrack’s camera technique, of course, while Denevan images, which have no source in the real world, also have neither explicit nor implicit light sources. Instead, his landscapes glow with what we take for the diffuse light of early morning or late afternoon.

Of course I don’t read minds, and my assertion that Denevan starts with how paint behaves, rather than a specific landscape he wants to depict, is a conclusion based on the look of the finished paintings. A local arts writer recently compared the look of these paintings to the effect of paint-remover on bands of paint. What he actually wrote was that the texture of Denevan’s paint resembles the way paint breaks up during chemical dissolution. Yet while giving a good mental picture of something hard to see except in person, this description suggests a painting process that is almost certainly the reverse of how they are actually made. Modern high performance paints often come in parts that must be accurately mixed during application in order to perform as intended. It appears that Denevan has experimented with alternatives to the rigorous, ‘correct’ application of such paints, bringing them to a far more demanding point where they are on the verge of failing while producing effects far more interesting from his point of view. By capturing paint as its components solidity for the first time, Denevan captures the look of paint decomposing—just as his images suggest the rotating interaction of earth’s elements in the ceaseless erosion and deposition of land by water, setting up the contrast that gives both their meanings to us.

Such processes demands from an artist more skill and more daring than traditional tools and materials, but the luminous and evocative results cannot reasonably be achieved by any more cautious or conventional approach. Long before there was an ‘avant-garde,’ the best artists were always on the edge of what we collectively can do to turn materials into visions. Whether it’s adding a layer of wax to a photograph or deliberately pushing paint to the limits of performance, artists seek new means in order to capture new experiences. The Julie Nester Gallery features such cutting-edge and experimental techniques.

The recent public airing of the unsettling story that Vincent van Gogh may have been murdered by a pair of teenaged punks unleashed speculation about what may have happened on that day 120 years ago, but beyond that to what one of the world’s best-known artists might have done had he lived beyond his brief 37 years, of which he was able to spend less than ten painting. For instance, might the restless painter have journeyed to the Americas, as so many painters did in those years? How could the man who used his brush to analyze the complex landscapes of southern France—so alive with color, contrast, and life—not have been moved to a similar effort when confronted by the earth’s skeleton, laid bare in the desert landscape of the Great Southwest?

We’ll never know, of course. But the question isn’t a bad starting point for viewing the Redrock Landscapes of Cori Redstone. Redstone has been a fixture on the Utah scene since 2003, during which time she has explored not only the subject matter and techniques of art making, but her capacity as an activist to influence events beyond her studio and the gallery. The depth of her interest in, and commitment to, public affairs, in particular environmental issues, parallels her evident desire to pierce the surface of appearances in her art and explore the connection between how things look and how they behave. A comment frequently heard among more aware members of the local audience is that she is still searching for a mature style, but careful examination of her archive proves otherwise. The visible differences between her treatment of her various subjects—trees and flowers, human figures, urban neighborhoods, and now the desert landscape—are consistent over time and more accurately seen as related to what she finds worth noticing about each.

How Redstone’s aesthetic interests build on those of the Post-Impressionists first became apparent about four years ago, in a series of botanical paintings—garden flowers and trees—that (to use a current idiom) ‘channeled,’ rather than copied, the look of of van Gogh. It’s an odd, rarely noted fact that where the Post-Impressionists are concerned, popular appreciation directly contradicts historical influence. Picasso and his peers worshipped Cezanne’s method of building likenesses from basic forms, while Gauguin’s emotional color cues liberated the Fauves and Expressionists. Seurat had so little impact on his fellow painters that today there isn’t a single major work of his in France, while fans flock to Chicago to stand before what they like to call ‘Sunday in the Park With George.’ And while by any meaningful measure, from name recognition to prices paid at auction, Van Gogh is the most successful painter ever, few artists have tried to further the research his death interrupted.

All this history is just to prepare us to appreciate Cori Redstone’s redrock landscapes: a series of paintings of familiar—one can with some justification say too familiar—scenes around the desert of eastern and southern Utah. Comparing her ‘Castle Valley Group’ with van Gogh’s ‘Plain Near Auvers with Rain Clouds’ reveals some remarkable similarities despite their very different subjects. Both artists painted from a high vantage point, from land that falls away before our view, creating a false horizon near us, beyond which the land, when it reappears, is distant. The effect is disorienting, producing an uncanny feeling that defamiliarizes something we have learned to see so well we don’t really look at it any more. Confusion and emotion give way in the middle to something safe and familiar. The landscape is benign if we keep it at arm’s length. Then there are the skies, roiling clouds before an ornamental screen. Despite the viewer’s conviction that this painting actually ‘looks like’ the place it claims to represent, in reality neither painting actually duplicates the appearance of the place, or of anything for that matter. Each represents only what it is: the dots, dashes, and squiggles of paint that, like the individual firings of our neurons in response to light, must still be combined in our true organ of sight—not our eye, but our brain—so that we can see. Gauguin was content with parallel brushstrokes that blend together into color fields, but van Gogh and Redstone give us fluid, occasionally agitated lines of variegated color related to what we know about the structure of their subjects: the stubby lines of crops or the flowing, rain-eroded rocks of the desert.

There are multiple examples of this process at Charley Hafen Gallery, which thanks to Hafen and his curator, Arrahwanna Thomsen, is quickly emerging as one of the best places in town to get an intimate view of work that would quickly lose its virtue in some of the larger galleries. Redstone is also known for less exotic (if no less telling) landscapes, like her view of the Capitol or the various neighborhood markets she’s captured. Particularly worth pursuing are her views of the environmental movement, including the stunning ‘Grand Palace of Consumerism,’ which brings her Gauguin-inspired sense of bold color together with the Japanese sensibility so essential to late 19th (AND late 20th) century art to produce a literally brilliant caution against the sensory manipulations of Late Capitalism. For those who have had enough of hair-splitting landscapes by artists desperate to find ever more subtle ways to distinguish their craggy mesa from the previous one, or who just want to cleanse their visual palates in order to once again taste the nuances, this painter is highly recommended.

Cori Redstone will be at Charley Hafen until November 14th.

NOTE: This is not a special effect. This is a straight video, and what  you will see is exactly what you would have seen if you had been there.

One of the battles that artists have had to fight, first with themselves and then with their audience, is the whole question of what it means to ‘look like’ something. Ever since artists began to abandon the search to duplicate optical appearances, the argument about ‘realistic’ or ‘representative’ art has only grown sharper. It’s not hard to show that for most viewers, abstract art is actually much easier to interpret accurately . . . yet we constantly hear abstract art works disparaged and ones that use traditional strategies called superior, even when they don’t — can’t — mean anything to the viewer who is evaluating them. One thing we could stand to come to an agreement about is what these qualities actually mean, and why we respond in the many valid ways we do. The answer will not come from philosophy or aesthetics, apparently: they can only come from science.

We all know what memorials for great men look like. Part of what motivates ambitious lives is the hope of that final prize: a statue in a public place, a white marble structure to keep memory alive. But beyond a tombstone, if that, what kind of memorial can the average person, someone whose accomplishments are not celebrated, expect?

There’s a technical term we art historians use: demotic art. From the same root as ‘democracy,’ in the beginning it meant art of the people, as opposed to, say, the art of the church or that encouraged by the wealthier classes. When Dave Hickey talks about the Rolling Stones being among the more important artists of our time, and rock music a characteristic art of our time, I think demotic art is what he has in mind.

Every so often, a demotic art form goes viral and begins to sweep the land. Graffiti has been around so long now that it may be hard to believe that it was once such a movement. But it was. Once upon a time, travelers wrote their names in exotic places. Places like the pyramids yield centuries-old names, some of them famous. A few decades ago, graffiti acquired more universal content:

‘God is dead. —Nietzsche,’ appeared on a wall. Later, a scrawled reply:
‘Nietzsche is dead. —God.’

More recently, names have resumed their ancient primacy among graffiti. We’ve all lived through part of the change and growth, though anyone who wasn’t looking for it might have overlooked it. During the Great Depression, Hobos had writing on fences and walls all to themselves, and developed an elaborate code to leave signals for each other—signals that most people didn’t notice because there was no reason to look for messages scrawled in public places. They extended this to writing on boxcars, and for three-quarters of a century their names, usually in chalk, were about the only thing seen written on trains. Then the Graffiti artists of New York started elaborately painting the subway trains, and it spread, and now it’s rare to see a rail car on a siding anywhere in the United States that hasn’t been spray painted.

The residents of Prague and regular visitors got to see this in a different light. The Soviet occupation kept history and free enterprise at bay for almost half a century, so that immediately after the they left the city was devoid not only of graffiti, but of the advertising plastered on the public sphere that is a ubiquitous fact in the ‘free’ world. Then the images of products came, and on their heels painted tags started appearing on architectural gems that had survived largely unchanged from the Renaissance.

But Graffiti is isn’t the only example. In the 90s, someone thought to paint ‘shadows’ of pedestrians on sidewalks in memory of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki whose silhouettes, left by the concrete-bleaching light of the atomic bomb, were all that remained after they were vaporized in August of 1945. I remember reading about these stenciled acts of vandalism, part memorial and part forward-looking protest, and how they were spreading and how exciting it was when they began showing up on my local streets. Flash Mobs are a more recent example, one clearly related to a new form of immortality: the ability of an internet video to say to the world, ‘I was here.’ Show of hands: who’s heard of Flash Mobs or even seen some on YouTube and thought, “That would be cool if it happened here”? Some art fads remain local—probably in several separate locales, while others go around the world.

One viral art movement that I heard about, but never wanted to see in person, is the Ghost Bicycle. Ghost Bikes are real bikes painted white and located as permanently as practical alongside a roadway. Each is a memorial to a cyclist who died nearby, killed while riding, almost always struck by a motor vehicle. Like the atomic bomb shadows, they serve a double purpose: to memorialize the victim and to provide a warning to both drivers and riders, a reminder of what’s at stake.

I heard about Brynn Barton within hours of her death, and I recognized the intersection where she was killed, two blocks from where I’d lived until just three months earlier. Yet every time I passed that corner, where I used to walk almost daily, even though I was always aware of what had happened, I must have unconsciously fixed my gaze ahead. Traffic on East Seventh during rush hour routinely reaches speeds of 60 mph, punctuated by displays of adrenaline-fueled aggression. It’s a cliche to point out that commuters are in such a hurry to get to work or home that they forget there is no guarantee they’ll get there at all. But it’s different if you’re in a car, rather than a bicycle. The driver who killed Brynn Barton was in no danger. Not before the accident. There is no satisfaction whatsoever in knowing that the hit-and-run driver’s peril only began after the accident, or that it will never stop.

I didn’t know Brynn Barton, but I’m pretty sure most of those who did are not interested in what happens to her killer. I get that sense from the unmistakeable evidence she left behind. Her memories in the minds of her friends radiate a feeling that she was simply more alive, put more into living and got more out of it, than the average person. Her visits to foreign countries, not as a tourist but as a citizen, are echoed by the praise her fellow health care providers heap on her name. She was the kind of person whose absence doesn’t seem any less of a loss over time. So I wasn’t surprised when I finally made the effort to look, that someone had placed a white bicycle on her corner.

Brynn’s ghost bicycle isn’t her only monument. Across the street, the city has put up a sign reminding drivers to share the road. It’s a curious avoidance of responsibility for the circumstances that make riding so dangerous here. A decision was made before many of the local streets were laid down to channel traffic away from neighborhoods and onto a few, consequently very busy streets. Quiet, residential streets are kept that way by making them into pockets that have have few inlets or outlets. As a consequence, it’s difficult or impossible to navigate from most places to most other places without using the thoroughfares that everyone else is using. I’m an art critic, not a city planner, but I can see the value of the goal our city set so long ago. But what about those citizens who still want to get around, but would rather not walk or cycle alongside freeway traffic squeezed onto common streets? The Ghost Bicycle doesn’t just recall a lone rider: it also memorializes a life that we might have lived where we didn’t give almost all the space to our cars.

The elder statesmen who envisioned and built our cities have their large, bronze and stone monuments in the parks. There are always costs connected with their accomplishments, but their monuments don’t speak of guilt, displaying instead the need of the many to believe in their greatness, and in greatness itself. Such display often include text that says We Will Never Forget. But we do, and have to be reminded. On the other hand, we may find that it is the intimate memorial, not the one that calls for ceremony but the one that allows a feeling of direct connection between what we asked to remember and our own lives, that truly matters.

It’s pretty clear that summer has given way to fall, and winter can’t be far behind. The students who just recently returned to school will be donning raincoats, galoshes, umbrellas, and once in the classroom will gaze at the windows, watching the eternal race of raindrops to be the first one down the glass. In other news, the art world, which also takes the summer off, has resumed its schedule of exhibitions and social gatherings. Ah, but does anyone want to go out in this weather, slog across town, fighting not only traffic but sudden desert inundations and downtown flash floods, then fight the parking battle only to splash through puddles and arrive dripping at a gallery that will probably be full of dark, dreary canvases—with beige walls awash in brown washes and black splashes? Who needs the imaginative expression of angst when we have so much of the real thing, and not just facing us today or tomorrow, but stretching out ahead for months?

One alternative that always works for me is a visit to Art Access, across the street from the old Rio terminal. The mission of Art Access is to make art accessible to everyone, regardless of physical capacity. Their staff finds whatever is necessary to overcome any limitations that might prevent an individual with a desire for self-expression in art from doing so. It’s angelic work, and the good feelings that come from doing well by doing good infect first the staff, then the audience that frequents the gallery. A splendid example of how this pays off has been on view in the back gallery this month. Its walls are all-but covered with richly-colored pastel drawings by Brian Bean. Art exhibitions usually have a theme: something that ties all the works sharing a space together. Some themes have to do with subject matter, others with content, or influence, or any of the other metrics by which eye, mind, and heart measure art works. Some themes are material, like the use here of pastels. But the true guiding spirit of Brian Bean’s gallery full of drawings is twofold: first, he loves drawing, a fact he makes no bones about and that is immediately obvious. The other is that every drawing was done on a ‘canvas’ that the artist gets for free, and that we all have a lot of experience with. He’s drawn them on brown paper shopping bags.

As anyone who’s ever been to an artist’s supply store knows, good art materials are expensive. Durable canvas or paper and bright colors that won’t fade don’t come cheap. One of the pressures on an artist like Bean is the need to match his ideas and execution to the precious materials he needs in order to be sure his expression lives up to the quality of those ideas and execution. (Did someone say ‘vicious circle?’) So maybe part of the reason these drawings come across so immediately and with such vibrancy and impact is that they were done in the absence of intimidating expectations. As Bean says, he could always get more bags to work on. As for ideas, the terror of the blank page has stopped many would-be artists from proceeding, but here there was always something to respond to, as a quick review will show. Some of the bags had handles, other notches or serrated edges. There were folds, and in the case of several winning ‘series’ of related drawings, logos of the stores they came from. There are some with a name and others with a design. Part of the fun is seeing how the artist used these as the stimulus for free associations that spin off one to the next.

Most people who work hard at what they do appreciate the occasional task that seems almost not to need doing. That’s true here. There is nothing for a critic to do; Brian Bean’s love of making faces, of designing birds whose streamlined postures say ‘flight’ and fish that conjure underwater dragons, and in general of playing with his ability to make marks the way a musician might noodle on an instrument just to see what comes out, is infectious good fun. He takes us back to the roots of art, to the pleasure of seeing round objects on flat surfaces and exaggerating to tell the truth that makes doodling and cartooning eternally popular, but that too often gets lost in the labyrinth of art as competitive activity. Brian Bean competes only with himself here, and it’s pretty obvious that no matter how it turns out, he wins. And so do we.

Many galleries present art in a relatively blank, abstract space that strives not to impose any undue influence on the works displayed. The model for such idealized settings is the museum gallery, where artworks are usually placed far enough from building details or each other that they can be visually isolated by the viewer. There are exceptions, usually ones that survive from an era of private ownership: Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston and Henry Clay Frick in New York left their collections in their homes, which rival palaces in Europe as places to see art almost as it was enjoyed by the collectors themselves. There’s another way to display art, also very popular, which is to show it in a space that conjures the scale and furnishings of a potential owner’s home. This takes some of the guesswork out of buying art. Several galleries whose artists regularly come to the Post’s attention follow this plan. The Meyer Gallery, in the old downtown section of Park City, has characteristics that survive from the silver mining boom: sturdy construction, a light-filled atrium behind the front windows, a mezzanine behind to provide office space. Susan Meyer and Thomas Cushman consciously strive to fill these spaces with an appropriate environment for home ownership of art. In Salt Lake City, meanwhile, Charley Hafen Jewelers occupies a free-standing corner location, typical of grocery stores and similar businesses from a bygone age. While the hip Hafen presides over cases of ornament that fill an alcove in the back, Arrahwanna Thomsen runs a gallery in the mixed-use front that is consistently worth checking in on. An example of how the building serves the art can be seen in ‘Calligraffiti,’ through Oct 18.

Toni Youngblood’s ‘Calligraffiti’ draws the intersection of two recent art impulses that continue to stimulate both the eye and the mind. One is Encaustic, the ancient Greco-Egyptian medium that began a revival late in the last century. Encaustic artists replace (this is reversing the historical fact, of course: wax was in use long before most other mediums) the polymerizing oil or plastic molecules that support and bind most paint colors together with a combination of natural or artificial wax and resin. Some artists lay down a layer of wax, paint on it, then melt the color into the wax. Others mix the color into the wax and paint with it in a molten state. Either way, working this mix requires virtuoso control to build up layers of wax in which light penetrates layers of translucent color and fills the work with a luminous depth no other paint medium can match. Fused glass sometimes comes near, but rarely achieves the control available to an Encaustic virtuoso.

The other element in ‘Calligraffiti,’ as the name suggests, is written language. In works like ‘Life in Acronymica’ and ‘Cursive is as Cursive Does,’ Youngblood uses actual alphabets in a variety of styles and colors that combine with the patinated quality of the wax body and surface to produce effects reminiscent of antique enamel signs or painted windows. In other works ‘Beach Tide’ or ‘Where Music Lives,’ the loopy gestures of handwriting suggest natural analogues and similarities between human media. The ‘Sweat Equity‘ series evokes the grid pattern and recurring shapes of letters on a page, using bits of found material to connect different kinds of labor and various ways to get the feeling of ownership—like concentrated effort and skill. The most charming works are a large number of small squares, each set on its own easel, each making its own choice from an infinite number of variations on the written or printed word. Sometimes a medium is so sensuously pleasurable that a fragment can feel as satisfying as a larger work. Broken fragments of Greek sculpture, like glimpses of ideals, have this quality, as do Arabic tiles, with their creamy glazes. Small Encaustics like these have it, too: to see them is to envision one as a icon, an object of meditation, a magnet for soft light and deep color in a too-often harsh and shallow place.

“Every object exists in two worlds. One is the tangible that we know through our senses and another that exists only in our minds. It is in this mental realm where objects take on the properties of metaphor and meaning. These are seldom fixed, but exist in a fluid dance . . . .” —Ed Bateman

The invention of photography led to some of the greatest misunderstandings in the history of art, a field already hexed by the myths and fabrications that a mysterious quality like creativity sometimes sustains. The most egregious idea that arose in the camera’s wake was that painting died when chemistry took over the skilled labor of reproducing likenesses: that photography was the means by which science killed art.

It’s not true, of course. Someone is always mistaking transition for death (and death for transition, but that’s a topic for another day). The notion that the Industrial Revolution blindsided painting during the middle half of the 19th century may have persuaded artists and critics of the following decades, but it was and remains nonsense. In the first place, the inventors and early users of photography were predominantly artists—a fact obfuscated but still visible behind such references as Wikipedia’s calling Daguerre “a French artist and chemist.” Second, while the idea of ‘progress’ is just one of many things about us that many of our contemporaries have lost faith in, only a fool can fail to see how the ability of artists to reproduce visual appearances improved from century to century, until the phrase trompe l’oeil (literally ‘to deceive the eye’) could be applied to an image of any thing, including the human face. Third, photography, like the brush uncounted centuries earlier, was just another tool artists could choose, or not use, or augment and experiment with: a much-desired shortcut in what had become an extremely elaborate process in the hands of painters like Bouguereau. The quick captures—akin to sketches—of the 1830s were followed by liberation from the burdensome task of making visual copies of mundane reality. Modernism, abstraction, all that we have today only became possible when ‘painting’ no longer exclusively meant ‘likeness.’

But if that’s true, and the invention of the camera was just the beginning of a (long, painful, disorienting) transition phase for painting (and maybe sculpture too, with the arrival of the digital age, though it’s too soon to tell), where does that leave us now? Shouldn’t we be seeing paintings—works of pure visual and aesthetic imagination—that exploit the advances wrought by photography? We should, we have, and we do . . . including, most recently, the work of Ed Bateman, U of U art professor and an artist who exhibits locally and around the world. Unlike Van Chu (see my previous post), who takes photographs that he transform into something akin to paintings, Bateman uses no camera and is not restricted to subjects that can be placed before a lens. In fact, he subverts the old distinction between ‘before the lens’ and ‘behind the lens.’ All his lenses are within his images, and like everything else in them, have only a nostalgic connection to real objects. Some Bateman images are pure paintings: original visions that he realizes on a computer, drawing and rendering with software to produce convincing, photographic-quality likenesses. Others are assemblages in which he treats digital images as found objects, mining them for resonant fragments of similitude he can incorporate the way his peers use found bits of stuff to give their works more dimensions.

Bateman’s earliest, or ‘classic’ works (as labeled on his website) constitute a kind of visual declaration of independence. Constructed in the computer, originating entirely in his imagination, they take the form of completely convincing photographs even as they self-consciously hint at their real origins. They feel composed, but not just in the sense of arranged; rather, they feel assembled, put together on purpose to make bravura use of reflections, refractions, and shadows that almost cry out, ‘Look at me! See what I can do!’ Most contain repeating elements that appear to have been synchronized, or even choreographed. Sophisticated, presumably autobiographical references to philosophy, literature, and art underscore that their origins lie more in cerebral acts of creation than in mere reflection of the material world; in essence that, like all paintings, they are products of human intention and not just collections—however deliberately posed—of appearances the artist had no control over. Affirming his continuity with a tradition that had been lost a century earlier, they read like academic paintings more than they do like photographs: convincing enough to have come from a camera, but free from the limits and limitations of that particular mechanical path from object to image.

Whether meant to or not, artworks operate on multiple levels, succeeding when they create a single, dominant impression that subordinates some others. This attribute, classically called ‘unity,’ is like the digital folder that allows computer users to collect varied impressions—sound, sense, image—under a single icon. In Bateman’s classic works he’s doing several things at once, and sometimes his choice not to let one dominate another works against them. If the viewer is busy observing the remarkably convincing resemblance to actual photos of real things, the narrative threads, wicked visual puns, and wit they represent can get lost. Of course that works—or doesn’t work—the other way as well. And they’re all very busy, as if each one has to contain everything in the series: everything Bateman the thinker and everything Bateman the artist can do. Sometimes the challenge becomes daunting. The viewer’s mind may even have to choose, either to be so taken with the illusion as to miss its compound implications, or to become so involved with decoding the rebus-like image as to mistake the digitally painted image for a mere photograph. Of course it’s not necessary to ‘get’ everything that’s there in order to enjoy looking at it. A work of art should deliver a palpable, physiological feeling of pleasure, and these are among the most exciting, most intriguing images I’ve ever seen. They demand a lot from the viewer, but they return the things they ask for, including the ability to be comfortable amid almost total uncertainty.

The elements best able unify a work are usually the simplest and most accessible. Landscape grandeur, celebrity likeness, and biblical drama have worked well at times. In ours, satirical humor and fashion fit the bill. A couple of years ago, Bateman introduced both into his work in what he called The Mechanical Brides of the Uncanny. Humor grounds itself in narrative, and the story of the Brides begins with an appeal to that 19th century equivalent of Facebook: the carte de visite that introduced affordable photographic portraits to society, and that everyone who mattered soon carried, traded, and even collected. The era of the carte de visite was also the moment when machines ceased to belong only to the wealthy and began to play roles in everyday lives, entering the home to clean, prepare food, and entertain. It’s a moment that ruptured the stately flow of history, changing not just lives but the people who lived them, seeming to sum up the past while predicting a transformed future of strange new powers and materials. It’s an age almost perfectly characterized by one of its products—popular science fiction—and by visionaries who remain trapped in an age of horse-drawn carriages even as they dream of spaceships. This Janus-like moment turned out to offer the perfect environment in which to achieve the liberation from specific time Bateman wanted for his work, that it needed and stood ready to capitalize on.

Fascination with the timeless quality of Victorian futurism and its various projections are nothing new, having arguably begun among the Victorians themselves and never really abated. Novels, magazine satires, and movies have all exploited this historically unique intersection of acknowledged past with credible-but-impossible future, but Bateman had the good timing to introduce his digital version simultaneously with the rise of Steampunk as a popular fashion. The first personal machines, the democratizing power of photos, the self-confidence that characterized the Victorians, and their own impeccable sense of fashion made Steampunk the perfect vehicle for his project. Here, rather than creating the entire scene from scratch, he accepted the challenge of starting with pre-existing, antique photos of typical Victorian scenes. High on the list of factors determining the choice of each was finding the space within it to insert a new figure. He then conceived—according to his notion of contemporary design, a sense of whimsy, and a feel for anthropomorphic humor—a household robot to be rendered and inserted seamlessly into the scene. Each seemingly authentic composite tableau, with its Victorian archetypes only reinforced by the alteration, was converted into a convincing carte de visite. The title term ‘uncanny’ announced the artist’s accomplishment in escaping both the era they represent and the one that brought them forth. Unmistakably partaking of the past, yet—like so much of the visionary imagery they emerge from—still looking futuristic to us much later, they query us gently, asking why we haven’t become what they predict. Our pleasure in their accomplishment includes a certain smug pleasure, a sense of superiority to their silliness, but the laughter they provoke contains more than a little reflexive venom.

Having found a milieu that resonates so well with his purpose, Bateman set to work on two new series that will be on view at the Phillips Gallery at least until mid-October. Like the Brides, both are built on a scaffolding of authentic period materials, borrowing the characteristic look of photos and paper mountings from the period, including the patina of age and use, incorporating them into forgeries capable of convincing anyone but a specialist. Here, though, they also uncover and bring to the fore intellectual and cultural matter that also belong to the time: we might say they ‘channel’ some notorious Victorian proclivities.

The images in ‘Science Rends the Veil’ initially resemble the Brides, but instead of cartes de visite, they draw on and mimic Tintypes—the less dangerous to make and more affordable photographs that soon replaced Daguerrotypes. Following the American Civil War, in which large numbers of citizens became soldiers, only to die in combat, many Americans became obsessed by the after-life and the possibility of communicating with the dead. If anything, the death of Prince Albert precipitated an even more morbid response in England. The same kind of technical advances as had made the war so deadly and failed Queen Victoria so grievously were called on by quacks, charlatans, and no doubt a few sincere researchers in response to popular curiosity. If the telegraph enabled President Lincoln to instantaneously contact his generals, could electrical circuitry provide similar connections between a world of energetic matter and one presumed to be pure energy? Actual photos of some of the equipment they built exist, while shots of fairies and ghosts that were produced by more conventional seances—obviously painted in or staged with cotton batting—looked utterly fake to today’s better-educated viewers, even before exposure to Photoshop. But just as Bateman, in his robots, bridged the gap between what they could imagine and what we can, his ‘Spectral Devices’ deliver what Victorian fakers could not. Setting aside the likelihood that some viewers will take them at face value, we may scoff at their silliness even as we appreciate and respond to how well they capture the eternal relationship between naive victim and sophisticated perpetrator.

Throughout these Spectral Devices, unexamined assumptions necessary to the success they might have enjoyed over a century ago abound: for instance, why do the dead present themselves in the same dress and stiff poses as the living? But if the artist affords us an opportunity to scoff, there is no reason to believe he wants us to take it. After all, statistics show that most Americans today believe things just as unlikely as what we see here. The advance of science, with its powerful new processes and machines, was expected to lead to an age of rational control over the real world, but instead has failed to diminish widespread belief that invisible presences and irrational forces are what truly determine our fate. Instead of operating on the basis of a level of knowledge unprecedented in human history, we dwell in a cosmos of willful uncertainty. Here again, the window on human folly is also a mirror.

The other series on view here, ‘Pentateuch/Quintessence,’ mimics not only old photos and the bits of print that accompany them, but reproduces the look of a nearly complete antique book. (The ‘nearly’ turns out to be part of the work’s point.) If ‘The Mechanical Brides of the Uncanny’ or ‘Science Rends the Veil’ can be viewed in a glance and appreciated (at least initially) with a smile, ‘Pentateuch/Quintessence’ is a more grave, hermetic, and literally as well as metaphorically darker work. Like Bateman’s ‘classics,’ it encourages philosophical musing, but instead of inviting viewers to revel with him in the remarkable verisimilitude now possible in the computer, he challenges the casual way we accept not just visual substitutes, but questionable replacements for things that have equal, or even greater importance in our lives. Once again he exploits old printed matter and his ability to generate authentic-looking antiques, but here his deeper subject is the way our minds manage information, specifically by abstracting its essence for storage and retrieval, and how various representations, including (perhaps most importantly for artist and audience) works of art attempt to re-present the world of sensual experience in a way that aspires to foreground its essential nature.

‘Pentateuch’ refers to the first five books of the Bible, chapters supposedly written by Moses that stand in relation to the whole Bible as it stands in relations to the three major religions that grew from it. ‘Quintessence’ refers to a fifth element, beyond earth, air, fire, and water, but containing the essence of all four. Bateman has imagined a printed, illustrated copy of the former, on which a reader has made notes in an attempt to draw parallels between the two systems of five. In order to make this project accessible in a work of art, he first reduced each of these five books to five paragraphs by running it repeatedly through software meant to summarize a text while reducing its bulk. He then provided each chapter with a mock-photographic plate that relates visually to what it says, and added notes in red that speculate on which element best represent each biblical book. In his accompanying statement, in which Bateman recounts his work like a scientist might an experiment, he writes:

Creating a work of art can be a process of magnification and abstraction where an idea or image is reduced to its essence. It is a process of translation where some aspects are emphasized and other elements discarded. Sometimes an essence is discovered and at other times, it is simply a distortion. We know all history, even our own, through a process of reduction, retelling and interpretation.

Even when a compound event—a book, a theory, or a world—yields up a true essence, its complexity suffers. In that way, it’s always a distortion. In the fifth book of Moses, one reads “THOU SHALT FEAR the Lord thy God; him shalt thou serve.” The words are drawn from the original text, but standing alone, do they crystalize or distort the text’s overall message? Does the kernel of the text, revealed here the way rocks are when the tide goes out, support the illustration, on the opposite page, of a femur pierced by padlocks? In the third book, a telephone speaks with tongues of flame. The image draws on an accepted gospel image, but is the effect the same? Just as the book unbound is no longer a book, but an assortment of ephemera, so almost everything we carry about with us, from our memories to the contents of our wallets, is a distorted copy of something we once experienced.

In expanding his repertoire, from photo to book of photos with text, Bateman doesn’t just display additional skills in image-making. He’s also expanded his aesthetic footprint, urging his audience to consider that his whimsical jokes and visual conundrums are only the harmless projection into our awareness of something far more sinister that we ought to be aware of, too. After all, we’re quite acclimated to taking the vague suggestions on TV, computers, and now our cell phones, in magazines and so forth, for physical facts. But we also seek out, even prefer, auditory images of musical performances and human voices and chemically-induced flavor images of naturally occurring foodstuffs. Until recently, such substitutions were limited to entertainments and works of art, substitutions we recognized as such and contemplated for enlightenment as well as for pleasure. Now, however, in many lives they replace much if not nearly all of actual experience. There was always a level of risk in the representation of sensual experience: this is why Plato, one of those who wrote about the Quintessence, warned so strongly against copying the physical world. In the past, though, guidance came in the form of allegorical content, or when that failed a hearty laugh. Ed Bateman restores some of that serious purpose (and serious comedy) to the artistry of our age. In the process, he makes works of art that demand reflection, and that seem to be among the few that are attempting to be and to do something truly important.