Biddeford has been in the news a lot lately, particularly for its burgeoning food scene and for being a refuge for people who, priced out of Portland’s inflated real estate market, are finding more affordable housing solutions there. On a recent visit, my impression was that the town is still a pretty scrappy affair, but not without its art pleasures. Two very different exhibitions – one I’d describe as “niche” and another that tackles a broad array of political issues – are worth a look.

The niche exhibition, “Of and About the Road: The Automobile in History, Society and the Environment” (through April 7), attempts to tackle the enormous role cars have played in American culture, as well as its potential as a source of creative artistic expression. The second, a solo show of works by Iraqi-born artist Kifah Abdulla, is only reluctantly titled (more on that in a minute) “Your Vision” (through Mar. 13).

“Of and About the Road” is co-curated by multimedia Phippsburg artist Dan Dowd and Hilary Irons, gallery and exhibitions director at University of New England. It takes up residence in the Jack S. Ketchum Library Gallery of UNE’s Biddeford campus. The space itself is modestly proportioned, which inevitably imposes limits on the ambitious intentions of the show’s theme. It is composed of, essentially, two spaces: a longish narrow gallery and a multi-use room with plate glass windows looking onto the courtyard in front of the library.

Dowd’s own assemblages hang in the latter space, which is used by students as a lounge, making silent contemplation of the work difficult. Dowd has long been fascinated by the texture and secret histories of discarded materials, often fashioning old apparel, rubber inner tubes, rebar, pressed-tin ceiling tiles and other items salvaged from a local transfer station into wall sculptures.

Here, however, the mix of materials is quite specific. Dowd is a lifelong aficionado of Saab cars, exclusively owning and driving various models since 1991. The brand went bankrupt in 2011 and stopped producing cars under that name in 2014. “I am intrigued by and fascinated with the loyalty SAAB drivers have and the community these cars create,” he writes in the exhibition statement.

Consequently, the four wall sculptures presented here are made with upholstery, interior panels, lights, headrests and other Saab artifacts. Dowd’s reverence comes through most powerfully in two pieces made with headrests from which swatches of auto upholstery hang like the robes of idealized classical sculptures. They emit a kind of presence that can evoke religious objects such as Christian reliquaries or Russian icons.

Dowd also presents a video memorializing Dick Lussier’s Lewis Auto Sales in Lisbon. Established in 1960, it’s one of the few remaining used Saab dealerships in Maine. Clearly Dowd means to convey the unavoidable passing of this relic into the annals of automobile history. Yet his presentation consists of fairly straightforward takes of car yards filled with crashed Saabs from which the business harvests parts, people working on cars hoisted on lifts, the resident cat prowling the grounds, and so on.

While we do grasp the intended nostalgia, the video misses some visual tools that might have made it more evocative: The camera voyeuristically tracing the lines of a Saab as an object of desire, for instance, like movies that longingly pan a naked body. Or we might have seen the dealership at twilight, it’s sign flickering. Perhaps we could hear the sounds of the workshop without actually seeing the mechanics, which could have amplified Lewis’s inexorable journey toward becoming a ghost of history.

A video by Portland artist John Fireman, on the other hand, is wholly absorbing. Fireman examines the phenomenon of road rage by cross-cutting among graphic scenes of various drivers losing it, idealized archival footage and, most intriguingly, interviews with USM professor of criminology Dusan Bjelic, who comes off as a kind of mad prophet of the road.

Bjelic’s calm, academic take on the phenomenology of road rage casually throws around phrases such as “Being modern is like a kind of combat training” and “The car is essentially an instrument for inventing mechanical time,” and he describes road rage perpetrators as “identifying with sociopaths” or suffering the “neurosis of being a martyr.” His deadpan, irony-free rationale seems diametrically opposed to the irrational explosions of violence that flare up intermittently on screen.

Another notable work is South Portland artist Philip Brou’s grid of what appear to be roadside photographs but are actually deftly rendered watercolors that track time by recording scenes he passes during his regular runs. There are other works too, by Jarid del Deo, Abdi Nor Iftin and Randy Regier, all of them amounting to an alternately humorous, quirky, disquieting and melancholic view of auto culture through the ages. Artist Jamie Chan’s paintings of cars summon for her, according to a wall label, how “Smoothly hugging a curve was always a way to express joy.”

PROTESTING ART

One of the victims of Biddeford’s escalating popularity may soon be Engine, the community-based arts nonprofit started a dozen years ago by Tammy Ackerman, Joshua Bodwell and Stephen Abbott. Engine’s downtown location and the town’s fortunes have made the building increasingly valuable real estate, and its owner is asking the artists who rent studio space here (and show in the main-floor gallery) to move.

One of those artists, Baghdad-born-and-raised Kifah Abdulla, has filled the gallery with paintings, sculptures and maquettes for future sculptural projects. In the 1980s, Abdulla spent eight years in an Iran prison after being captured as a POW during the Iran-Iraq war (the subject of his memoir, “Mountains Without Peaks”). He’s also published poetry. After his release, Abdulla became an artist and activist.

What most characterizes Abdulla’s multimedia work is feverish experimentation. Through that experimentation, he wants viewers to examine their own visceral reactions without the taint of preconceived notions about what the work might mean. Which is why Abdulla rarely titles his pieces, and even hesitated to give this show any specific thematic moniker.

Some of Abdulla’s experimentation can be quite successful in terms of eliciting visual and emotional impact. The energy and outrage of a couple of paintings that protest plastics pollution of our oceans is palpable. For these large canvases, he took various items of plastic trash, tipped them in paint and hurled them at the paintings’ surfaces. A kind of action painting, the splash and spatter of his acrylics record the forceful contact of these items with the surface as well as the energy behind the act of throwing them. One senses the rage and frustration bottled inside this soft-spoken man’s diminutive figure.

Another work refers more directly to his imprisonment. Against a wall is a large, primarily black-and-white painting of Abdulla, his hands lifting his head off his neck to hold the head above the upper edges of a barbed-wire fence that Abdulla has placed before the painting. There’s a certain violence in the dismemberment of this action. But there is also sadness, as it signifies Abdulla’s desire to be tall enough to look over the barbed wire he saw every day for eight years. Viewers can approximate this frustration by looking at the work through a small barbed-wire window that hangs at eye level several feet in front of the painting.

Commentary on the ever-swelling global immigrant crisis begins with a pleasant painting of the surface of the water. However, variously colored twine then extend from under the canvas to the floor, connecting to several pairs of tennis shoes painted the same bright colors, which represent lives lost under the sea during desperate exoduses from impoverished and war-torn countries.

Not all his work specifically refers to some kind of hardship. For one painting, Abdulla dips common toilet plungers into black paint and presses them in rows across the surface of the canvas. As each is pulled off, the suction creates splattery circles whose interiors resemble brains. The result is a painterly abstract geometric work that is formally handsome as well as expressionistic.

You might not like all of it. For example, a canvas on the floor painted by rolling a tire dipped in black acrylics across it carries no particular charge or aesthetic interest. And there is an “all over the place” sense of an artist not settling on any particular voice, even if many of the voices Abdulla expresses are worth listening to.

Those that abstract Arabic calligraphy can be immensely powerful. The sculpture maquettes show a lot of promise in terms of how they toy with ideas of weight and balance of forms. Another unstretched canvas displaying what looks like autonomic scribbling, with random areas filled in by color, can have a Miró-like dreaminess. Just by its sheer diversity, it’s likely that viewers will find a lot here to contemplate as well as some things to love.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com