DE | MARCATION
A Survey of Contemporary Photography in Utah

Curated by Amy Jorgensen and Edward Bateman

May 24 – September 27, 2019

DE | MARCATION surveys the contemporary photographic landscape of creative practice by artists in the state of Utah as they navigate new territory in the global dialogue of imagemaking. The works delineate new boundaries and challenge the photographic traditions of the West as a hallowed land—the landscape as a rugged vista to be conquered and tamed under the banner of Manifest Destiny and the settling of Zion.  

Header image: Vans Vault, David Brothers

Early photographic surveys of the American West explored the physical territory; this exhibition examines the conceptual landscape of creative practice by photographic artists spanning the vast spaces of Utah. The artists have strong connections to the state and their images represent a diversity beyond geographic boundaries; they interrupt convention and draw new lines. Intended to serve as a record of a historical moment, the exhibition reflects the dynamics of shifting cultural narratives and our relationship to place in a richly interconnected world. It represents not only the current state of photographic art, but also its future.

About the Artists

Kimberly Anderson

In her work as a photographer, Kimberly Anderson is a storyteller—stories of land, history, individuals, cultures, groups, and mythologies. She weaves personal narrative with site-specific imagery, combining elements of land, earth, mineral, and metal into her printed work. Anderson’s storytelling relies on listening, for it is in the listening and understanding that one can truly have a hopeful chance of sharing. Recently, Anderson has collected narratives and portraits of individuals sharing a common bond of humanity and shared spiritual trauma. This has caused a paradigm shift from within, realigning her need to hear and artistically share these stories. Now the listening, hearing, and holding of new experiences has become a unique and sacred trust.

Christine Baczek

Christine Baczek is an artist primarily working in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has lived and studied in Chile, Italy, Chicago, Santa Fe, and China, but finds the most inspiration for her work in Utah. Her research and practice focus on analog and alternative photographic processes like cyanotype, platinum/palladium, chromoskedasic Sabatier, and film. She uses this expertise in historical photographic processes to address ideas of time, perceptions of documentation, and the process of observation. Her work often comes from a fascination with Utah’s past, present, and future, and she uses her surroundings and daily life as points of departure for her imagery. Baczek has worked broadly with the artistic community of Utah in positions at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Kimball Art Center, and as a writer for 15 Bytes. She also established the alternative photography studio Luminaria with her partner David Hyams. www.luminariaslc.com

David Baddley

David Baddley is an artist working with land-based action work, video, and photography. He is a Professor of Art/Photography at Westminster College where he runs the photography program, and lives in Salt Lake City. Baddley’s work has been included in more than 82 group exhibitions and 16 solo exhibitions, including shows at the Finch Lane Gallery, Salt Lake Art Center, Nobrow, and Granary Arts. His work has appeared in several publications, including Art Week, Neon Magazine, and Leica View. www.davidbaddley.com

Edward Bateman

Edward Bateman directs the Photography and Digital Imaging area at the University of Utah. His innovative use of 3D computer modeling combined with photography has been widely written about and included in six textbooks. He contributed both text and images to Seizing the Light: A Social and Aesthetic History of Photography by Robert Hirsch. Bateman and his work have been profiled in Printmaking Today, the authorized journal of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers in the UK. Mechanical Brides of the Uncanny, a signed and numbered book of his work was published by Nazraeli Press. Bateman has exhibited internationally in over 25 countries and is in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Victoria & Albert Museum, China Printmaking Museum, and The Getty Research Institute, among others. www.ebateman.com

David Brothers

David Brothers’ multidisciplinary practice encompasses painted and constructed installations as well as photography, film, video, radio, and printed publications. Recently, he mounted a solo exhibition at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and won the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant as well as a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Utah Division of Arts and Museums. Brothers’ work is published in Dear Dave, Rolling Stone, Popsmear, Maxim, Stuff, and Slug magazines. Sundance Film Festival premiered three of Brothers’ feature films, one of which he co-directed and designed, and two for which he served as designer. Brothers also created numerous publications in various genres including comics, Tijuana Bibles, collections of experimental limericks, and photo essays. Earlier in his career, he wrote, directed, and performed two weekly radio programs, creating more than 50 half-hour episodes of experimental radio theater. www.davidbrothers.net

Van Chu

Van Chu is a Vietnamese artist whose painterly photography explores the connection between tradition and modern digital technology. His artworks have been featured in exhibitions throughout the United States, juried by curators including: Maura Lynch from The Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Nathan Trotman from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Samantha Rippner from The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Christiane Paul from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Van Chu has also received multiple first-place awards from curators such as Elisabeth Sussman from the Whitney Museum of American Art, Lauren Hinkson from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Felice Frankel from Harvard University. He teaches at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City where he resides with his wife Nhi Ma and his daughter Lily Chu. www.vanchuphotography.com

Samuel Davis

Samuel Davis creates images that reference his love of family history (his father had once been a participant in an atomic test during the 1950’s, while other family members worked on the first submarines during the Civil War) coupled with a playful curiosity of popular and kitsch cultures. He creates images that he hopes will cause the viewer to pause and question while simultaneously providing a pathway into another frame of reference, encouraging viewers to proactively imagine. Davis is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Southern Utah University. www.samdavisart.com

Daniel George

Daniel George is a Vineyard, Utah-based artist and educator whose photographic work is rooted in the medium’s documentary tradition. Having lived as a transplant in various locations throughout his adult life, he uses the camera to study defining characteristics of the communities within which he resides. The resulting photographs are his attempt to visualize and understand the idiosyncrasies of human activity in these local cultures. George’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the United States, and has been published internationally in both print and online publications. He teaches photography at Brigham Young University. www.danielgeorgephoto.net

Haynes Goodsell

One of the most overlooked aspects of my work is the inherent performativity—not as action, but as introspective play. If the work exists solely for my own consciousness, then this is purpose enough. Haynes Goodsell is a conceptual artist who works with lens-based media. Primarily using himself as the focal point of his creative work, he has spent the last decade making photographic self-portraits. As a gay man, there is often an undercurrent that explores his own sexual experience. He re-contextualizes appropriated family images and videos to show the malleability and richness of autobiographical source material, thus inviting us to reconsider our pasts. www.haynesgoodsell.com

Mark Hedengren

Mark Hedengren is the author of The Mormons and Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange’s Three Mormon Towns. He directed the film Sundance Skippy and is the 2013 recipient of the Utah Arts Council Visual Arts Fellowship. Hedengren’s work has been exhibited in numerous juried shows nationally and internationally, and he has had solo shows at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, St. George Museum of Art, and with the Utah Arts Council. markhedengren.com

Amy Jorgensen

Amy Jorgensen is an interdisciplinary artist whose diverse practice involves creating conceptually immersive works that mine historical and contemporary perspectives to explore intersecting narratives of the body, desire, violence, and power. With solo exhibitions at LA><Art in Los Angeles, Elizabeth Houston Gallery in New York City, and Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Jorgensen’s work has been exhibited in over 75 exhibitions, including the historic all-woman FAIR during Miami Art Week, GuatePhoto Festival, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Oceanside Museum of Art, AIPAD, and Brigham Young University Museum of Art. A recipient of multiple grants, Jorgensen and her work have been featured in Artnet News, Huffington Post, NY Arts Magazine, Don’t Take Pictures, Dialogue, At Length, and others. Dedicated to the arts as a maker, educator, and facilitator, Jorgensen is an Associate Professor at Snow College, Director and Curator at Granary Arts, and a member of the Utah Arts Council Board of Directors. www.amyjorgensen.com

Natalie Kirk

The youngest of four children raised by a single mother, Natalie Kirk grew up surrounded by educated, self-sustaining female role models. She gives credit to the strong women in her life for the success she has had in her developing career. As an artist, Kirk is devoted to the medium of photography as a visual language. Growing up in the conservative environment of Utah, she learned to make communicative art about controversial topics, working towards changing perspectives on social issues involving women’s rights and gender. She teaches at the University of Utah and is a photographer for a bioengineering and manufacturing company. www.natkirk.com

Karalee Kuchar

Karalee Kuchar is a fine art photographer and performance artist. She incorporates her extensive background in dance and movement into her performances documented by her camera as witness. Kuchar believes it is through movement that we can discover the source of our opposition and ultimately free ourselves from it. In her performances, she explores themes of light versus darkness and the struggle we experience in liminal spaces. Kuchar’s work fuses figure and landscape. By exploring earthly and spiritual connections through interaction, she seeks to discover the union of these relationships in order to unveil their elemental sources and seek change. www.karaleekuchar.com

Carsten Meier

Carsten Meier is a German-born photographer known for his large-format renderings of urban and natural landscapes. His work has been collected and exhibited in the United States and Europe, reviewed by international press including Die Zeit and The Washington Post, and published in his monographs Public Parking (2005) and Dam (2015). Meier came to the US as a Fulbright student and continued on to earn a degree from Ohio University. He began his teaching career at the Volkshochschule Dortmund and was an Assistant Professor at the University of Miami before joining the Department of Art + Design at Utah State University in 2011. His research often intersects with the natural sciences, and Meier is part of a team that was awarded a 2014 National Geo- graphic Grant. In recognition of his success advising student research proposals, Meier was named the 2015 Caine College of the Arts Undergraduate Research Mentor of the year. www.carsten-meier.com

Bernard C. Meyers

Bernard C. Meyers is recognized internationally as an artist and master printer. His work is held in public, private, and corporate collections nationwide and he is represented by Klotz Gallery in New York City. His pursuit of beauty and the abstract is an unwavering lifelong passion.

Bernard studied photography and traditional printmaking at Rochester Institute of Technology. In the 1980s he founded and managed a fine art printing business, Portland Photographics, and specialized in architectural photography and art reproduction. Throughout his commercial career he continued to exhibit work, and his exhibition history includes numerous group and solo shows. A lifelong arts educator, he currently teaches at the Waterford School in Sandy, Utah. www.bernardcmeyers.com

Andrew Patteson

Andrew Patteson is an artist and teacher living in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah. He grew up in Florida and moved to North Carolina and Ohio before heading West. His art practice centers around photography, but has also included elements of sound art, video art, and installation. He is inspired by moments of discovery and shifting perception, when noise becomes signal, when sound becomes language, when order leaps forth from chaos, or when meaning seeps forth from cracks in the surface of the mundane. He is drawn to collision, slippage, and dislocations of the self. He seeks to better understand the human relationship to place and space. www.andrew-patteson.com

Kim Raff

Kim Raff is an award-winning documentary photographer based in Salt Lake City, Utah. She specializes in documentary photojournalism, seeing stories in her own backyard and capturing intimate portraits of the human experience. From the Deep South to the American West, her craft has drawn her into people’s living rooms, pulled her onto mountain tops, and humbled her at gravesides. After receiving a degree in visual journalism she went on to a seven-year career in newspapers, which included staff positions with The Salt Lake Tribune and The News & Advance. Her ongoing documentary project Land of the Free, which follows the resurgence of a militia movement in Utah, was awarded a support grant from TheDocumentaryProjectFund. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. Her work has been commissioned and published by prominent national and international publications around the globe. www.kimraff.com

Nancy E. Rivera

Nancy Rivera is a Salt Lake City based artist whose work has been exhibited in selected solo and group exhibition throughout Utah. She participated as an artist-in-residence at Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in the Fall/Spring of 2017-18. Her work explores the dichotomy between the real and the artificial by employing nature as a motif and a metaphor through photography and three-dimensional works. nancyerivera.com

Fazilat Soukhakian

Fazilat Soukhakian is an Iranian artist and photographer who teaches photography in the department of Art and Design at Utah State University. She considers herself a visual storyteller who observes and records her concerns regarding social and political issues that surround her. Soukhakian creates work as a means for social change and justice, reflecting on important issues concerning gender inequality, gender segregation, and the loss of national identity. She documented the lives of many people who were suffering as a result of these issues. Her work has been shown throughout national and international exhibitions and she has received a multitude of awards and recognition. www.soukhakian.com

Josh Winegar

Josh Winegar is a photography-based artist and educator whose work has been exhibited in numerous cities across the US and abroad. He is the grateful recipient of several grants and awards including a Hemingway Grant, a Lindquist Endowment for Creative & Artistic Endeavors, a Follet Fellowship, an Albert P. Weisman Memorial Project Grant, and a Utah Arts Council Fellowship. He lives with his partner Peggy and their two children in a small cabin in the woods in Utah where he finds quiet time to work on his art. He is an Associate Professor of Art and directs the photography program at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. www.joshwinegar.com