In a recent write-up of the Lewiston show, “Industrial Maine: Our Other Landscape,” Portland Press Herald art critic Daniel Kany writes that of the nearly seventy works in the exhibition, he was most impressed by Dan Dowd’s pair of wall assemblages.
“Dowd has a rare ability to establish dignity in detritus,” Kany writes. “Dowd’s work is deceptively subtle, nuanced and brilliant. He hints at the outside edges of design intelligence, art object aesthetics and the history of assemblage to bring us fully back to Cubism and its focus on the minimal variables necessary for recognition – specifically in terms of labels like “gun.”
Work by Dan Dowd. Photo courtesy of Dan Dowd.
Kany continues: “In the wake of recent shootings in places like Parkland (or wherever it is next week), Dowd’s work feels urgent; in the context of “Industrial Maine,” it’s a reminder about the state’s history of gun manufacturing (e.g., Saco Defense) and, of course, that Maine is where that scourge of civilization, the machine gun, was invented.”
