The thing that immediately set Stephen Batura: Stream apart from its peers was the fact that once viewers were inside the gallery, they were completely surrounded by landscape paintings, mostly set along the Platte River. Interestingly, the exaggerated horizontal views depicted in the show's seventeen works didn't have continuous compositions, so the images didn't flow from one to the other. To further the point that each panel was a separate work, Batura gave each a distinct palette. The paintings are based on amateur photos by Charles Lillybridge that Batura found at History Colorado; he used the Lillybridge snapshots as preliminary "sketches" for the paintings but only loosely responded to the photos, changing their details at will. Using historic images as a source for these landscapes pushed Batura's work into the realm of conceptual realism — and created a truly extraordinary visual experience.