...Elroy Artspace presents a March First Thursday opening reception and 2-month-long exhibition of Edwin Wade's fine art serigraphs in "Our Friend the ATOM."

In the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, Wade presents a series of hand-pulled original serigraphs which explore the juxtaposition of Marlboros, Martinis and Hysteria associated with the Atomic Era of our nation.     

With Our Friend the ATOM, Wade pulls back the curtain of this era when the modern world “built monuments to modernism and lounged with highballs," and exposes the very eerie feeling of ‘Atomic Paranoia’ that was hiding just behind it.

Edwin Wade studied Studio Art at Youngstown State University, and today works out of Zygote Press, a fine art printmaking co-op in Cleveland, Ohio that provides all the tools & equipment artists have used for hundreds of years.  He lives in a Mid Century Modern split-level ranch in Cleveland, which serves double duty as his painting and design studio. 
 
Elroy Artspace Gallery resides within the walls of The Original, Portland's downtown destination for all-day dining, renews the spirit of diners and supper clubs from the 1950s and 60s by serving up playful variations on the era's standards of food, art and design.  So come and enjoy an evening of colorful, roadside-history art and that much deserved First Thursday nightcap. Settle into a spacious booth for a night of conversation and a cocktail, or stretch out in our plush retro-luxe banquette for an elegant dinner.  With an innovative and colorful menu of classic favorites in an atmosphere that's stylish, sophisticated and cool, The Original honors the past as it listens in on the pulse of Portland's adventurous and evolving tastes.  

July's Tilt Shift America - dual gallery show artist Bryan Solarski is in contention for a Hey, Hot Shot! award... 

HHS! Contender: Bryan Solarski By Stacy Oborn

* as published on the Hey, Hot Shot! photography competition blog, a Jen Beckman Project

The first words that came to my mind when viewing the work of Bryan Solarski were "constructed photography." Just thinking this provoked a meta-response of, "Well, isn't all photography essentially constructed?" While there are photographers that actually physically construct dioramas or stage scenes in miniature, and still others that might utilize the vastly kitsch appeal of lomographic action sample sequences, or photographing in 3-D, what we have here is someone that shows us the world made smaller, more colorful and appealingly more manageable.

Bryan utilizes an in-camera technical manipulation known as "Tilt/Shift" in order to create these colorful, miniaturized versions of actually experienced scenarios and events. Cartoonish, and alternately soft and then sharp-focused, looking at a world rendered through this lens induces not only perspective shifts but psychological ones as well. The viewer is cast back into a period of childhood, when everything one experiences feels larger-than-life.
  

While largely sticking to immediately recognizable places in our collective, global consciousness, Solarski depends upon our familiarity with these scenes in order to playfully manipulate our picture-perfect mental images of places like the canals of Venice or a hockey game at a major sports center. Instead, he presents these scenarios to us in toy-like technicolor, devoid of any actual personalized or otherwise contextualized meaning. You might thank him, really, if having been to one of these points-of-interest yourself, you had an emotionally complex experience or one fraught with personal "growth," and can now look at this collection of images as a tabula rasa of the place. Here you need only to recollect the color, the light, the sensory waves of the place, and enjoy being unencumbered by any of that pesky, grown-up contextual baggage.

   Admittedly, I didn't until last year.  Scott and Myah so love this genre of art that Myah's gallery business card for their gallery when in Hood River featured a tilt-shift photo by Myah (a talented photographer and artist) of the gallery on it...I loved it!  Because it looked like a miniature diorama or toy of the street and gallery I really thought it was just a photoshop trick...and essentially it was...tilt-shifting is accomplished with either a special camera lens or via digital manipulation.  Some folks even refer to the technique as 'miniature faking'.

   Life is busy and I'd forgotten about it entirely until the couple talked with me a few months ago about their idea to bring this genre out of the niche chatrooms and into the open for all of us to enjoy!  Their goal is grand, and it starts with a gallery show of this beautiful art.  They wanted further reach than Hood River and asked if Elroy Artspace would be interested in doing a concurrent show with them, and I jumped at the invite!  Now that they've moved their gallery to Portland, and right next door to Elroy, this will be a show which makes a statement, for certain! 


   Please subscribe to and keep up with Scott's "Tilt Shift America Project" BLOG, as he's about to begin pumping relevant tilt-shift info into it regularly, thanks!

   So here's a few links to tilt-shift photography images for those of you who may not be familiar with the genre, or to whet your appetite for our July show if you are.  I hope that you fall as deeply in love with it as did Benjamin|Benjamin and Elroy!  Enjoy and Cheers!... 

1.  80 gorgeous tilt-shift photos to see!

2.  A few more great examples!

3.  Wikipedia knows all - here's their tilt-shift page!

4.  How-to tilt-shift in Photoshop!

5.  A bunch of links to galleries and more tilt-shift info!

6.  And, of course, the new TIlt Shift America BLOG!