Seth TANE: Trading Places
May 10 – June 30, 2018

Several years ago, Seth Tane hopped a barbed wire fence off State Route 14 near Dallesport, Washington, searching for just the right place to site a subway station. Surveying the rocky landscape, he took dozens of photographs, all of which he scrutinized back at his Portland studio. The daylight in one of the pictures perfectly matched the angle of the sun in another photo he'd once taken of a subway stop in downtown New York. Seamlessly blending the disparate images into a single scene, he created a large painting in which New Yorkers appear to emerge from the F Line into a desolate stretch of the Pacific Northwest.

Over a four-decade career dedicated to urban and rural landscape painting, Tane often juxtaposes places he's been. Trading Places, his first solo exhibition at Modernism Gallery, explores this theme from multiple angles, presenting several of his "Subway Surrealism" paintings together with depictions of locations ranging from Fossil, Oregon to San Francisco's Chinatown.

Highly accomplished as a Realist painter in the tradition of Edward Hopper and John Register, Tane portrays his subjects in meticulous detail, motivated by an interest in sharing what he's encountered. "I'm after causing the 'experience' of these locations to re-occur for the viewer," he says. To achieve that feat, he photographs places extensively, composing his final work from details captured in many different frames.