City
Scapes, a collection of interpretations of the life and soul of the
city, will make its debut in Kensington Market this weekend. Photographer
Tanya Sillers' exhibition of work expressing the "excitement of urban
life flashing by" opens at Moonbeam Coffee Company on Saturday and runs
until Tuesday, April 8.
New to professional photography, the
self-taught Sillers, 45, took up the craft two years ago at the urging
of her artist husband, Michael. "His encouragement got me started - he
handed me some paints and a camera and told me to go to it," she said.
And
to it she went, scouring the city aboard a streetcar in search of shots
reflecting the living beauty of the world, while balancing strength
with subtlety.
"I take pictures from the streetcar because I find
it affords good, open angles," she said. "I just get a bunch of tokens
and grab my camera. I basically used to live on the streetcar anyway,
going here and there all over the city, and what I noticed was that the
speed of the city - it moves so fast - was symbolized really well by
the movement of the streetcar."
Some of her favourite sites to
capture the buildings and people that make up the city she loves so
much, she said, are Kensington Market, Queen Street and the
College-Carlton area.
The best of the resulting images are
cropped and printed on fine art paper using archival links in limited
editions - creating prints that last longer than traditional
photographs, she said.
"Watercolour paper also offers a more textured and grainy quality to the images and makes the colours more muted," she said.
"My
approach to photography is very traditional. I don't play around with
the images or their colours too much - what you see is what you get,
and I like that."
City Scapes is showing from Saturday, March 15
until Tuesday, April 8 at Moonbeam Coffee Company, 30 St. Andrew St. in
Kensington Market (north of Spadina and Dundas). A reception will be
held from 7 to 9 p.m. on Saturday, March 15 at which the artist will be
present. For more information, go to www.pollydude.com