Walls are loosening. True, but gates are blocked.
“Rats and monkeys
Crowd the city
As it crumbles
Into ruin
Walls are loosening -
True, but gates
Are blocked.”
In this site-specific installation of new work by Daniel Luedtke, negative shapes and edges demarcating walls, windows, and bodies are recreated and rearranged using resin-treated materials. Figurative and abstract prints, drawings, and sculptures index and exchange the dynamics of formal and narrative exclusion. Negative becomes positive, and new negative spaces emerge. These formal meditations on the identity and character of difference generate space for unseen figures to appear.
“I keep returning to the word foment. To foment means two things. In a medical setting it is described as a topical medication, salve, or lotion for the skin. In a political context, it is used as a verb: to foment dissent, to start a riot, to start a coup. I like the duality of treating a surface and also starting a process of creating structural social change.
I live in reference to the AIDS crisis, which I barely experienced, yet it informs the way that everyone speaks about HIV. I think of these histories like ghosts that haunt the present. My health is still politicized by that history and is maintained by the medical technology and pharmaceutical companies that I critique. This feeling is like the title for this exhibition. Yes. The walls are loosening and access to medication is increasing. Access to information has increased. This also increases necessary and difficult relationships with pharmaceutical companies and other arms of neoliberal capitalism that I feel conflicted about.”
Documentation
