Much like a semiotic arrangement of words in a language, I pair these flattened references to bodies, technology, sexuality, conceptions of gender/race and medical management to illustrate how stable subjectivity and identity politics can be rearranged, questioning and confusing the dynamics of power relationships and social norms. I consider works to be complete when an entire composition appears unified, but not solidified, permitting the viewer to rearrange each floating signifier in their mind. Depth and dimensionality are built up though a process-based layering of transparent color and material upon "blank", non-referential substrates such as foam-board and paper. My paintings, sculpture, prints and videos use flat indexical drawings and images as foundational elements that are collaged and assembled into final compositions. These partial and fragmented signifiers illustrate the simultaneous and contradictory ways that identity and history are constructed and fractured with use. Through the process of tracing and indexing body parts, domestic objects and institutional architecture, I question how objects, images and subjects perform themselves. The absence of symptoms and the presence of disease are neither exclusive nor contradictory, and I use this experience as a way to create images and objects that highlight how representation is both narrative and incomplete. I reside in this contradictory understanding of my body as a medically managed, healthy, full-body-quotation of the dark years of the epidemic. ![]() The act of living with HIV today is to be within its historical midst without its shadow. ![]() This role reversal of reader to text imagines a system where bodies stand-in for individual letters, acting and moving within an efficient and flexible system where meaning, purpose and usage is promiscuous and changing all the time. Figurative shape and reference are presented partial and flat, underlining the thickened, viscous text-sculptures. This process mimics the ways that actually-factual tile guards appliances and architecture from the messy, wet, uncontainable nature of bodily maintenance (cooking, bathing). ![]() Repeating and interlocking resin-coated "tiles" respond to the esoteric features of Roman Susan's gallery space and act between the architecture, enlarged letter-form sculptures, pictograms and viewer. Just as a 3-Ring Binder presents a temporary and mutable structure and ordering of pages in a book, this work illustrates how figurative images, paper pages, found objects and color relationships create associative narratives that influence our understanding of text itself. In BINDER, Daniel Luedtke presents new sculptures, paintings and installation-based work around ideas of provisional, fractured and associative ways we use language to orient the moving target of identity. Its curled tongue pointing upwards to held and parted lips, starting and ending a population of tenses. How do I have and hold my body when I read the "R" in power? As I think backwards, scanning through a bulk of memory, I am struck by how promiscuous that same letter "R" has been.
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