At Dallas Contemporary, the gallery walls are filled with art graduate student’s small, precise works that carry big ideas. "In The Works" is second iteration of the Dallas Contemporary NTX Graduate Student Program, a collection of paintings, sculptures and mixed-media installations by North Texas MFA students staking out their own visual language while exploring the same underlying question: what does it mean to become an artist right now?
The gallery invited Anna Katz, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, to spend several days meeting with 17 third-year MFA candidates. She narrowed the field to 8, but said nearly any of them could have made the cut.
“Thinking about how to put this show together had to do with work that I knew could stand on its own in a group context,” she said. “I was thinking about works that could set their own terms. Articulate their own terms, express their own ideas, and also play well with others.”
The result is a show that feels self-contained yet in conversation, each work confident enough to hold its ground.
Many of the pieces are modest in scale, but they wrestle with weighty themes such as time, loss, the politics of the body, representation, and the lived reality of borderlands. Katz was drawn to their precision, and to what the work reveals about three years spent largely alone in the studio, experimenting, failing and, Katz said, "trying to pry open a space in thinking or esthetics or in politics or in materials that hasn't been pried open yet.”
What unites the artists, Katz said, is less a shared biography than a shared commitment.
“They've all made this bold and admirable decision to dedicate themselves to art in a world that very likely will not reward them for their efforts.”
Their work doesn’t necessarily declare itself as Texan so much as it reflects the region’s mix of perspectives and geographies. Taken together, Katz says, the show gestures toward the future of art itself–proof that even within the most familiar forms, there’s still something new to discover, more uncertainty to explore, and more images waiting to be made.
MEET THE ARTISTS:
Janay Bookhart
School: University of North Texas
Medium: Photography
Name of work: "Mattie’s World"
Description: A collection of black and white photos focused on her grandmother’s house and belongings to connect and learn more about her life after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
In their words: “Going through her things, I just learned so much about her from an adult standpoint. It just makes you realize that there's this saying that ‘You're twice a child’”
Marcy Davis
School: Texas Christian University
Medium: Sculpture
Name of Work: Untitled
Description: Davis warps the familiar until it becomes unrecognizable using clay, wax, chalk and adhesives to act as skin, wounds and scars to mimic body parts and structures inside and out.
In their words: “I think a lot about displacement, what happens when something's inside. Possibly outside. What happens when structure begins to like slip, collapse, something that is thriving but in itself comes out into this environment."
Alexandra Green
School: Texas Woman's University
Medium: Digital photography
Name of work: "Betty Feels Beautiful"
Description: A collection of stills showing a green, exotic, feminine monster named Betty living a normal daily life in North Texas breaking social norms and group thinking, allowing creativity and self-expression to thrive.
In their words: “Something that I'm really passionate about is showing people, through my own example, that we can carve out niches of belonging for everyone. Betty is who I aspire to be. She is confident. She is sassy. She is mysterious. She's like if Marilyn Monroe and a fish monster met. It's important to pursue the things that make you, you, but also that make you feel special or important and that it's also important to infuse play and whimsicality into our everyday lives.”
Christopher Najera Estrada
School: Texas Christian University
Medium: Drawing
Name of Work: "Fermentation," "Parallel Portals"
Description: Using graphite, color pencil and gouache on a 168 by 34-inch muslin, "Fermentation" explores both personal and collective spiritual landscapes of ancestral knowledge.
In their words: “Before TCU, a lot of my work was based on this idea of healing and what that means, right? I was doing work about intergenerational trauma, and that's kind of evolved into this bigger philosophical idea of how to go about healing, both individually and collectively. This idea of inner transformation as a conduit or as a catalyst for a collective bettering. There's that idea that if you work on yourself, everyone in your community, everyone that you're in relation to kind of also heals in some ways.”
Nadin Nassar
School: University of North Texas
Medium: Mixed media sculptor
Name of work: "Sometimes I wish that you could really see but it's safer if we just pretend," "I was liberated, I was free, I was everything you told me I wouldn’t be/Amerikkka’s freedom forn’t all," "Sunshine: baba ya baba, I know you want your baba"
Description: "Sometimes I wish that you could really see but it's safer if we just pretend" uses cotton, plaster and gauze to create a faceless human body sculpture removing a hijab. Mirroring the body is a separate hollow hijab formed in the same shape as the human body. This piece investigates the ways that violence becomes palatable, justified and accepted when it's directed towards people that we do not see as human.
In their words: "Violence a lot of times becomes easy to digest when it's directed towards people that we do not see as human anymore, right? I particularly focus on the ways that Arab and Muslim bodies are framed, misread, and politicized. I find that using imagery and repurposing it is a form of resistance and self-definition. Arab masculinity is something that's usually flattened in Western media as something of the archetype of aggressor or oppressor, completely stripping them of the humanity that exists in their role as father, son, brother, just like a man. So, my work back there actually speaks about masculinity from the perspective of a daughter. And really reflecting the resilience behind that.”
Alfredo “Freddy” Ortega Marquez
School: University of North Texas
Medium: Oil painting
Name of Work: Diablo en rosa / Su nombre, Madre de los exiliados, No Deseados
Description: Diablo en rosa is a oil painting of villagers seemingly living a normal life trapped inside a wall within a bigger wall while a detailed skull peeks over watching them from above.
In their words: "I lived in El Paso, Texas for about 12 years. You start noticing how the[border]is just like a physical separation. In my current body of work, I started to play with that lens of being an immigrant but also thinking on how I'm a mixture of two cultures. I'm the mixture between European indigenous. I'm not just one thing, but I'm a hybrid, to put words into it. I've been playing with walls, the separation of space, the separation of land, and other ideas, and how it tries to contain us.”
Susan Seaborn
School: Texas Woman’s University
Medium: Oil painting
Name of work: The Sky Above Me
Description: Various shades of blue evenly coated on 120 nine by six-inch wood panels dedicated to different days of the year showing the range of the daily light show above us.
In their words: "I was kind of amazed at all the different colors of sky in this other body of earth that I have. Not that there were all these different colors. But I had never paid attention to it. And here I am focusing on color, and there's this great show of color above us every day and every minute. I wanted to pay attention. What's surprising is that this may have started thinking about color, but it very quickly became this meditative ritual that I do every single day, weekends, it doesn't matter. And it's this act of marking; it feels like I'm marking time and like I am slowing time down.”
Tina Vahed
School: University of Texas at Dallas
Medium: Videography, vinyl print
Name of work: In-Between
Description: Two 49-inch monitors play a black and white flashing loop of two videos. On the left, a woman laying faceless on the ground in the middle of the crosswalk in a parking lot. On the right, the ripples of unknown water. Below these monitors is a 150 by 108-inchvinyl print of the same image of the woman face down on the ground shown on the left monitor.
In their words: "Living as a woman, as a queer woman in that kind of area, it's really hard. You need to cover your body every day. There is a lot of censorship to showing your body, showing your identity. So basically, when I came here, most of my work was about discovering myself. As a moment, so I try to maybe sometimes fight with myself, fight with the shy part of[myself]and try to put my body as a woman in public space to just fight about how societies, how people try to say what you should say. What you should do, what you should show.”
