ART Seven Artists to Buy Now

HUNDREDS OF ARTISTS ARE AT work in Dallas, with a rich mix of galleries, museums, and university venues devoted to exhibiting their work. Pick a promising handful, as we did here, and you’ll find their work as different as their backgrounds. A fifth-generation Texan, a pre-med graduate, a native of Bombay, India. Talented and still under-known, their careers have picked up considerable momentum in the last year. The world is starting to notice them. Dallas art lovers better take a close look now.



DOTTIE ALLEN

DOTTIE ALLEN BEGAN HER ART odyssey when a friend’s pickup truck was stolen. “The truck was found abandoned with all the thieves’ worldly possessions in it, including a Kmart snapshot album, so I learned about the people who stole the truck,” Allen says, “That’s how 1 got interested in other people’s stuff. “This curiosity soon turned into an obsession, and into fascinating works of art. Allen uses found snapshots. letters, and notes that people write to themselves, such as Bible verses and shopping lists. “People misspell words in interesting ways, or maybe couples will have shopping list code words like ’sweet treats,’ ” she says. “This tells lis things about the individual and about us as a culture.” Allen then enlarges these items, tints and stains them, reclaiming and re-combining these fragments of life into disturbing or hilarious compositions.

Allen’s material includes prisoners’ correspondence and crime blotters from rural newspapers, but she would also like to rummage through Highland Park mementos. “I would love to get to them, but I just have not been able to,” she says. Her work is being displayed in Prague and Brno in the Czech Republic through June.

ISAAC SMITH

“Folk art is not governed by any set of rules about what art is or is not,” says Edleeca Thompson, curator at the African American Museum, referring to the work of Isaac Smith.

Even so, folk art has become big business, and Smith is one of this area’s most talented and prolific proponents.

While visiting Smith, it’s difficult to tell where his studio ends and his home begins. The walls are painted floor to ceiling with blue seascapes, and his wonderful animal carvings-monkeys, sharks, snakes, bobcats, and dogs-are everywhere. “I always looked at animals when I was a kid,” says Smith. “I would turn them upside down to see how many spots they had.” Now, the natural curve of a branch may determine the shape of a snake, and the artist’s imagination fires die brilliant colors of a tropical bird.

From April 19 to July 14, Smith’s work will be celebrated in a major exhibition at the African American Museum. “Right after I first met him in 1992, I had a sense that he was about to become very busy,” says Thompson. “And now he is.”



CORBIN DOYLE

TWENTY-EIGHT- YEAR-OLD CORBIN Doyle graduated from SMU with the unusual double major of pre-med and painting, and the latter won out. After attending a summer program at Yale, Doyle returned to Dallas to paint,

Doyle often begins with a question that can only be resolved by-making a piece of art. How do you show the passage of time? Doyle might make marks in wet plaster, and then in dry plaster, so each scratch freezes a moment. “A mark without time would be dying fabric or paper, because it is instantaneous,”he says. How can you put down marks that represent a landscape, without actually painting hills and trees? “I just walked around a forest all day and did little drawings, and then made a big painting of them.”

His first exhibition at Gerald Peters Gallery last summer, the product of several years’ work. featured dozens of drawings pinned all over the walls, several paintings with layers of marks, and spiral designs on the ceiling created by a giant compass-like “drawing machine.” “Some people think I am being anti-art, but I am not,” says Doyle. “I am interested in film, for instance, for the same reason-[ am trying to tell a story and to communicate.”



TOM SIME

MANY LOCAL ARTISTS WOULD WELCOME THE opportunity to exhibit their work in New York City, and Tom Sime is one of the few who has managed to do that while remaining in Dallas. Sime’s best works are abstract paintings with thick, translucent wax coats in colors such as aqua, amber, and deep blue. Recently, he has made pearly wax sculptures that may incorporate bits of metal or rope.

“The found object is submerged in this inscrutable yet beautiful muck,” says Sime, who also critiques theater for The Dallas Morning News and KERA-FM 90.1. “I love the idea of enveloping a man-made thing in this concrete fog-man’s active objects are reduced to a kind of stasis.”

Sime has had several exhibitions at the 500X Gallery on Exposition, and is planning a third withDenise Bibro Fine Arts in New York’s SoHo. “Wax is not a totally original material, but Tom uses it in a very special way,” says Bibro, ” I am building up to a one-person show in New York, but I don’t want to rush it,” says Sime. “Dallas is a good seeding ground for artists to get started, and I would not discount the importance of that.”



MARC WOLENS

MARC WOLENS PRACTICED LAW IN DALLASfor 13 years before becoming a photographer, but it didn’t take him very long to develop a keen eye. Wolens has recently developed a compelling van of “street photography” that captures an unusual moment, a fleering glance, an instant of tension, or a vignette filled with detail. “1 am trying to create a picture which is unresolved, which leaves the viewer room to bring something to it,” he says.

In one enigmatic photo, a homeless woman is covering her eyes. “She had an eye disease and I asked if I could photograph her,” explains Wolens, whose subjects have not always been so accommodating. “But then she covered her eyes-it could have been this Diane Arbus-type freak show picture, but this way it is more poignant.”

San Antonio Museum of Art’s former curator Don Bacigalupi, who selected a photo by Wolens for the 1995 D-Art juried exhibition, was struck by his work. “Wolens has the ability to conjure up a personal memory from the viewer, as well as refer to the history of street photographers.” Wolens now plans to visit a boxer’s gym, but not to seek the obviously bizarre. “I would just be as happy taking a picture in a supermarket to say ’see what you missed?’ “

MADHVI SUBRAHMANIAN

Bombay native Madhvi Subrahmanian’s work crosses the line between pottery and sculpture, with shapes reminiscent of Indian architecture and tropical fruits, and the rich hues of exotic textiles and spices. She worked for a while in more generic ceramics, but it wasn’t until graduate school at SMU that Subrahmanian discovered a need to incorporate her own identity into her work. “In Europe, everything is dull green, brown, and black,” says Subrahmanian, whose exhibit in Frankfurt, Germany, opens in mid-April. “I always try to get those bright colors like orange and green and yellow that punch you in the face-those are the colors you are attacked by in India all the time.”

Some of Subrahmanian’s vases look like ancient artifacts carved out of rock, but details like tentacled feet and blob-like forms add a postmodern wit. “We are attracted by the textures and colors, and a very special feeling of peacefulness.” says local collector Karol Howard, who, with husband George Morion, has begun to follow Subrahmanian’s work.



DAVID SZAFRANSKI

SZAFRANSKI JUGGLES THREE CAREERS: ARTIST, director of Gray Matters Gallery, and engineer for a major pharmaceutical company, but he is thoroughly devoted to art. This year, Sza-franski is finally receiving widespread recognition, with noted exhibitions nationwide.

Szafranski’s “paintings” are made of found materials such as strips of sponge, patterned tape, and fluff)’ marabou boas. woven into the classic modernist grid. He’s especially fond of the color red, which he associates with the body, sex, politics, and advertising logos. In one piece entitled Small Desire, red vel-vette ribbon-the tacky Christmas wrapping material-is woven into a luscious, glowing, perfect crimson square.

“The tightly woven surface is about control. hut red is very explosive,” says Szafranski.

Other works include light bulb sculptures, such as an intense, 100-plus light bulb chandelier created for local collectors Sonny Burt and Bob Butler, who have been buying Szafranski’s work since 1988. “Visitors always say they have never seen anything like it.” says Burt. “We walked into his exhibition one evening, saw a piece, and decided we could not live without it, We’ve bought one a year ever since.”