SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art presents new work by Dennis McNulty, a San Francisco-based artist whose work explores his Southern roots, on view June 7-July 13, 2007.

McNulty comes from the barrier islands that hug the Atlantic shore, an area marked by its creole heritage. He describes these islands as “dominated by iconic Southern imagery and ideologies,” and his installations recreate that atmosphere.

McNulty’s paintings draw upon a deep reservoir of Southern vernacular visual culture, one that has proved fertile in American art. Walker Evans and William Eggleston both mapped the region’s distinctive iconography, and traces of that vocabulary surface in Jasper Johns’s paintings. By choosing to work with a distinctively Southern iconography, McNulty continues this lineage in American art. His work can be difficult and haunting, fraught with history, but it also contains wit and humor.

McNulty’s image of the South is complicated and often contradictory: “Baptist, Presbyterian, and Catholic churches on nearly every corner, pre-1800s architecture intertwined with old live-oak trees, Spanish moss, shrimp boats, black-only neighborhoods, white-only neighborhoods…” McNulty’s disturbing “Black” faces (mask-like faces rendered in a style reminiscent of early-twentieth-century painted signs) reference this “segregated and separate” environment.

A wooden shack serves as the exhibition’s focal point. McNulty uses the shack to draw together disparate moments. He believes that the gallery’s white walls undermine the works, and prefers to present complete installations where “the viewer can piece the drawings and paintings into a story.”

McNulty holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a BFA from the Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. He has exhibited widely in San Francisco, including the 111 Minna, Southern Exposure, Upper Playground, Hespe, and Canvas galleries. This is his first solo exhibition.