Meadowlark by Ian Bates

Meadowlark by Ian Bates
Opening Reception:
* Saturday, February 3, 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Exhibition Dates:
* February 3 – May 31

The Image Flow is proud to present Meadowlark, an exhibition of photographs from Ian Bates’ nearly sold out monograph published in 2022 by Deadbeat Club Press in Los Angeles.

Please join us Saturday, February 3 for an opening reception with the artist.

This body of work was printed by The Image Flow right here in San Anselmo prior to being shown at These Days gallery in L.A. and, most recently, at the renowned Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco.

We are honored and thrilled to have Bates’ thoughtful work return home to the source and look forward to sharing his unique vision with you.

To make the pictures in Meadowlark, Bates spent years driving the vast, sparsely-populated spaces of the American West, often sleeping in his car.

This is a project borne of both passion and patience, and though Bates was initially inspired by the Western Meadowlark—state bird of North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Kansas, and Nebraska—the bird ultimately proved elusive, and appears here only once, as a crude facsimile painted on a weathered scrap of plywood.

It turns out there’s plenty of space out there for even birds to disappear.

Bates’ photographs are full of things disappearing in plain sight; like all photos, they’re an imposition, but given the glorious anonymity of sprawling tracts of western and plains states geography, they’re also about respectful distance, and the space(s) between people, places, and things.

These are places famous for keeping their secrets, and for maintaining a (long) arm’s reach from the outside world. A person drifting in such landscapes can never be entirely sure where they are, other than simultaneously on the outskirts of everything and in the thick of a perpetual and sublime (and very quiet) mystery.

Every photographer is essentially exploring outer space, but in Meadowlark Bates is in deep space, and these are photos that are as reticent as their subjects. This world doesn’t much nurture silence, but it’s still out there, a stealth force, a glacier, and in the places it lives it can hear things coming from a long way away.

Ian Bates is a photographic artist based in the Bay Area. His photographs look at his curiosities of contradictions in human nature around the United States and how people interact with the environments they inhabit.

His clients include A+E Networks, VRBO, The New York Times Magazine, California Sunday Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, WIRED, Lufthansa Magazine, Smithsonian, Rolling Stone, The University of Washington and others.