‘Transformative Visions’ at UMVA features work by Roland Salazar, Chris Morse and Dave Wade

An opening reception for the exhibition “Transformative Visions” will be held from 4 to 8 p.m. May 5 at the UMVA Gallery, 516 Congress St., Portland.

Roland Salazar, Chris Morse, and Dave Wade are three artists who come from different directions but share a common goal, an elevation of consciousness, a liberation of the psyche, a freedom of spirit.

All three are active agents of this visual alchemy. On a common quest for beauty and harmony, they seek to free the viewers from fixed realities, however harsh and discarded, and to transform them into something beautiful and altogether new.

While all three artists, working in either paint or pixels, start from separate places, magically they somehow arrive at a similar destination, a landscape of the imaginary that does not exist elsewhere, one that reaches out to the viewer and invites them to explore their own imagination.

Widely exhibited artist Roland Salazar, who has been painting most of his 95 years, mines a vast lifetime of experience, applying layers of paint and decades of brushwork and refined technique to depict the landscapes of his mind. “My Energy Art series was made as the COVID 19 Pandemic swept across the United States and engaged all of us in its dark threat of extinction. They are a depiction of energy using color, form, and composition to create art that deeply resonate with feeling, works that pulsate with a mysterious force, whether it is a force beyond us or part of our own elemental humanity.”

Award winning fine art photographer Christopher Morse is about as close as you can get to an alchemist today. Master of the overlooked, with his super resolution camera and keen eye, Morse dives in detail into the dents of the auto junkyard and rusty relics of the mechanical age, turning base metals into precious art. Using deep focus techniques, the photographer takes tiny fragments of found objects and blows them up to cinematic proportions, revealing images that can border upon the exotic and supernatural. Chris leads us to gaze upon hitherto untraveled landscapes of such singular beauty that their source is rendered irrelevant.

Photographer David Wade grew tired of objective image making long ago. After 40 plus years of shooting commercial, corporate and editorial stories for business and travel magazines, Wade finally decided not to allow the camera to become a personal prison, but a tool to escape the everyday. With one foot firmly anchored, Dave likes to explore the visual jumping off points where new realities suddenly emerge, where the imagination is allowed to run free and rule, a place where picture taking becomes a simultaneous act of meditation and self-liberation.  His goal as an artist is “ to free the psyche and re-invent the dream… to inspire and communicate a fresh sense of wonder”.