I walked by the other day, and there it was for the first time: Vermillion, a new art gallery in Capitol Hill, featuring as its first show Bad People Have to Eat Too, a series of photographs by Portland ad man Jim Riswold.

Riswold’s whole shtick—and his work—is hit or miss for me. He belittles dictators literally, by making photographs of them as dolls in toy settings. The titles are things like, Kim Jong Il Is a Big Sucker!, Chairman Mao Is a Big Yummy Yellow Cookie, and Adolf ‘n’ Eva’s Wedding Cake, and they’re accompanied by labels describing unpleasant and amusing relevant facts (about the appetites of Hitler’s deputies, for instance, or the origins of the Caesar salad).

(And according to a label on Riswold’s photograph of a skull made of colored sprinkles, titled Make Believe Damien Hirst For the Love of God, Riswold is working not only on dictators but also on artists in a forthcoming series called Make Believe Artist.)

I’d love to show you images of the photographs directly, but they aren’t movable from Riswold’s web site. But in shots from gallerist Diana Adams’s Flickr site of the opening, the gallery’s plentiful wall space is in full evidence. Some of Riswold’s installations—of photographs of chocolate-frosted cupcakes decorated with hammer-and-sickles (on the right in the image below)—climb all the way up the double-height space.

Adams e-mailed this about the gallery:

I’m going to focus on narrative and representational artists in all mediums. I have a soft spot for people who have worked in editorial, advertising, book illustration, comics and graphic design. I’ll touch on some urban contemporary, pop-surrealism, and contemporary figurative work.

Some of the artists she wants to show are Zohar Lazar, Hope Gangloff, 14, Joe Sorren, Lyle Motley, and Joel Dugan.