E-Mail This Article to a Friend COMMUNITY ART Dot matrix BY CAMILLE DODERO

Leslie MacWeeney gives me a test. "If I give you a word, what do you see in your mind first?" asks the executive director of the Dorchester Community Center for the Visual Arts (a/k/a Dot Art) over the phone from the nonprofit organization’s church-basement studio. "Do you see a picture of what the word represents? Or do you see the word written?" The word she lobs out is "train" — I immediately see a cartoon-y illustration of a steam locomotive. MacWeeney believes most people are visual thinkers, and she’s used me to make her point.

As a former teacher at the Massachusetts College of Art, MacWeeney thinks that visual-art education is essential not only because it caters to the way most people think, but because learning about imagery helps people express themselves. Especially in a ’hood like Dorchester, a place not known for its arts community or the strength of its public-school arts education, MacWeeney thinks visual-art education is vital. "If you lived in the ’burbs, they have art centers," says MacWeeney, a long-time Dorchester resident. "But here, if you’re a struggling single mother with four children, you’d be more worried about paying for the school uniform than for an art class." So MacWeeney has spent the past six weeks exploring aesthetics with 17 Dorchester high-school students who range in age from 14 and 18. They’ve trekked to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, learned about painting the human form, and created their own pieces. This Friday night marks the culmination of "Art on the Ave," an evening exhibition of their work, replete with prizes, food, and live music by a youth-outreach organization called ZUMIX.

In addition to the "Dorchester Portrait Project" — full-size color portraits painted on doors — one of the exhibition’s most visually arresting annual installations is the "People Project," a collection of eight life-size plaster sculptures that will stand along Dorchester Avenue for the next four weeks. To create them, the young artists spent the past six weeks casting plaster molds of hands, heads, arms, necks — their own, their friends’, or the appendages of mannequins donated to Dot Art by Macy’s. "Sometimes people don’t want to take off their trousers and skirts, so it can be kind of embarrassing," giggles MacWeeney. "When somebody needs a leg or foot, we have the mannequins there." Then the teenagers painted, varnished, and mounted the statues on metal stands. The outcome: surreal silhouettes, full-scale figures with mixed-and-matched body parts that are dreamlike and kinda spooky. "People get surprised by them," laughs MacWeeney. "They think somebody’s standing next to them and it turns out to be the statue."

Despite their ability to startle, the sculptures have become increasingly popular in their four years of loitering along Dot Ave: they’ve sold for $300 at art auctions, and thieves stole three last year — and they’re not being purloined simply for the sake of mean-spirited vandalism. "We got one back because somebody spotted it on a porch and got it back for us," says MacWeeney. "Can you believe it?"

The young artists’ statements add another expressive element to "Art on the Ave." Some are poems. Others are paragraphs. One is even in the form of rap lyrics, written from the perspective of the author’s statue. "He’s rapping on about sort of being cool," says MacWeeney. "Here it is," she says digging out the paper. "‘I may look lazy standing in one place/But I get all the ladies once they see my face.’" She laughs. "Isn’t that a scream?"

"Art on the Ave" will take place this Friday, August 22, at 5:30 p.m. at the Adams Street Collision Center, 1676 Dorchester Avenue (midway between Fields Corner and Ashmont Station). Call (617) 825-3329.