“The John Dowd Fan Club” Exhibition
Printed Matter, Inc.
This event has ended.
The John Dowd Fan Club, an exhibition of self-published serial publications and ephemera by late New Yorker John Dowd, a key (if often overlooked) figure in the correspondence art movement of the early 1970s.
The John Dowd Fan Club traces Dowd’s collaborative output through a near-complete overview of editioned publications and folded broadsheets, accompanied by extensive archival material including unique zines, xerox ephemera, promotional inserts, collages, mail art, correspondence, and original stencils. Highlights from the exhibition include a full set of FANZINI, edited by longtime Dowd collaborator John Jack Baylin, as well as Dowd’s music-influenced periodical THE STAR, and issues of his seminal collage broadsheet SUPPLEMENT, featuring a prototype version of a final issue never put into circulation.
John Dowd’s fascinating body of work draws from a huge range of influences, filtered through a pre-Punk xerox aesthetic and inflected by post-Stonewall political concern. Drawn from the pervasive ‘image bank’ of popular culture, the works’ lifted imagery was sourced from media and everyday life, removed from specific context and liberated of their captions. In a biographical statement written on Dowd (which he subsequently worked back into his art) he was quoted saying “I really like pictures in sequence, facing each other on opposite pages; then you can say something”. For Dowd it was a simple and beguiling equation in which collage and juxtaposition offered a wildly productive means to generate new narrative work that bridged the personal, cultural and political, often accompanied by his perverse sense of humor.
Media
Schedule
from April 21, 2017 to May 20, 2017
Opening Reception on 2017-04-21 from 18:00 to 20:00