AS220 Project Space
93 Mathewson Street
Providence, Rhode Island
September 3 through 25
Dan Wood showed me a print he had made nearly 10 years
ago, featuring the bottom of a Dunkin’ Donuts wax paper
takeout bag with assorted hot pink and orange color codings
and registrations.
This modest print of a print (lithograph/letterpress) is translucent and beautiful. It is also emblematic of his taste for looking curiously at the world around him — “looking at the overlooked” (to borrow art historian Norman Bryson’s title from his still life book) — and of Wood’s long-term expertise in printing multiples in affordable editions.
In the current exhibition, the understated letterpress print “Pinko Pfizer
Proof,” on 300g Pescia cotton paper, conjures
the donut bag image in its spare and keen
representation of an emptied Pfizer packet,
its pill already consumed. The evacuated
oval container is also oddly metaphorical,
shaped like a Greek hippodrome somehow
reconstituted by pill popping culture —
psychopharmacology as society’s new
competitive sport.
Wood is never simple in his technical or
conceptual approaches; he is a wholehearted
proponent of the conceptually bothersome.
In a visit to his crowded workshop full
of evidence of nonstop production as a
master printer working in letterpress and
offset modes, he speaks excitedly. His work
encompasses recollections of earlier prints,
misremembered headlines, found images,
found objects printed out of context and
found objects torn from newspapers. All of
these tastes and inclinations are evident in
the Providence exhibition.
Design elegance comes effortlessly to Wood,
as does a craftsman’s appreciation for
distinctive typeface designs and Asian-made
papers. He loves vintage postcards and other ephemera, inspired by the
intricate and productive ways in which socio-political commentary embeds
itself in the history of design. Wood grew up in South Boston, a community
where race relations were anything but easy. As a visual artist and citizen
activist, is closely attuned to how cultural/political conflict may pivotally
inform printmaking, especially letterpress, in the spirit of public broadsides.
Wood was a history major at McGill University prior to shifting to the Rhode
Island School of Design, where he studied in its honors program in Rome
as part of his BFA in printmaking. Then he apprenticed as an offset press
operator in Washington, D.C. and Rhode Island before launching DWRI Letterpress, his own highly regarded independent business for fine art and
commercial production.
Wood’s expertise in a 15th century medium featuring inked movable type
for printing text, eventually utilizing photography expressed through the
“extremely coarse halftone dot,” is familiar to most viewers from postcards
of the 1920s, among other iterations. Wood loves advertising and the
detritus of lives that identify “signposts, or
relics, to bring us back to our recent past.”
He collects reusable type and also presses,
but is not simply antiquarian. The small press
movement of the last decade, including book
arts, has grown large, but was prefigured by
prescient artists like Wood absorbing and
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