On the “City Lights” series “Speaking of Art,” local artists share insights into their influences, processes and experiences in town. David Batterman is an Atlanta-based multimedia artist whose skills encompass photography, collage and video. His visual artwork mainly favors collage, and he’s known for surreal, portrait-style depictions of composite human-like figures suspended in unusual places; a seated figure might be posed neatly in midair above an alpine mountain peak, for example, or against a background of radially bursting skyscrapers.
“I utilize a lot of commercial imagery from vintage sources, paired with machinery or technical source material to talk about the way that consumerism and militarism evoke automatic reactions in us, and how these systems are revered in an almost perversely holy way,” said Batterman. Sometimes figures in his work have heads replaced with chrome car parts, perhaps a crown of cigarettes or propeller blades. “I try to contextualize them using the underlying compositions of religious iconography.”
Batterman’s interest in vintage technology and military machinery doesn’t come out of nowhere. “I came from an Air Force family, so I spent a lot of time in those installations, just drawing away,” said Batterman. After high school, he briefly considered English as a major but pivoted back to art shortly after, getting a degree in photography from Georgia State University. Now, he’s a high school art teacher in Fulton County. “I’m really inspired by my students, seeing them discover their own artistic voices,” he said. “I can give them contemporary examples and show them that art isn’t just a bunch of old, dead, famous people, but something that’s happening right now.”
An Atlantan for the last 30 years, Batterman considers it a mecca bustling with artistic endeavor. “The music scene is brilliant, the visual arts, our festivals, a million little subcultures we have here, all the scrappy little DIY venues and galleries.” But, like many locals, he and his family were priced out of central Atlanta years ago, and he expressed his hope that the humbler treasures of Atlanta’s art scene stay preserved. Optimistically, however, he said, “Atlanta always seems to reinvent the good stuff in a new place; places like Day and Night Project, MINT Gallery, Jackson Fine Art…” and many more examples.
David Batterman’s artwork can be found at www.davidwbatterman.com and on his Instagram, @davidwbatterman.
