New York School artist Adolph Gottlieb once described the goal of his pioneer generation of American artists as making works that looked "brand new." Barnett Newman spoke with conviction about the "abstract sublime." This grandiose abstract Northern aesthetic was quite at odds with the shabby realities of the "old" South. (Why is everything in the South "old," one wonders?) Dunlap was quite aware of the lofty ambitions and inflated rhetoric of the New York School when he decided to do art that intentionally looked old, used, beat up. Following Marcel Duchamp's advice to find originality by looking to literature rather than to art for a fresh approach to content, Dunlap soon assembled a rich and varied cast of characters and recurrent themes.

His iconography is layered and dense, based on his own specific experiences as well as on traditional American myths and metaphors. He uses allegory, often to avoid a flat one-dimensional reading, just as he depicts cast shadow and angles objects forward into space to keep the pictorial space from being literally flat. To laminate or weave together layers of meaning, Dunlap superimposes a variety of objets trouves on his painted canvases. More often than not, the objects-shells, stones, gourds, branches, animal skulls and skin-are found in nature, souvenirs of the artist's travels and adventures, charged with personal associations and historic memories.

One of his most striking and ambiguous subjects is repeated in a recent series of works based on a photograph of a soldier shot through with arrows and brutally butchered by the Cheyenne Indians. Dunlap discovered the carte de visite reproduction of the disturbing photo, which made him think of St. Sebastian while researching material for the exhibition of historic war photographs assembled for the 1986 Corcoran show The Indelible Image. Fascinated by the ambivalent message of this archeological fragment of American history, he began to use the mysterious talisman, which was resistant to easy categorization or superficial "politically correct" interpretation, to suggest the complexity created by what are now layers of different civilizations.