Daniel Luedtke is an interdisciplinary artist living in Tallahassee FL. His work examines the ways that health, mortality, and bodily pleasure are quantified, categorized, and assigned value. This is in response to his experience as an HIV positive person navigating health, wellness, and insurance industries. These ideas are often illustrated by emphasizing the physicality of printed images and information in installations and other flat-but-dimensional objects. Luedtke received an MFA in Printmedia from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Music from Augsburg University in Minnesota. He lives in Tallahassee Florida and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University.

Artist Statement

My artwork addresses how bodies are quantified and assigned value. I use existing references to medical media and health and wellness to explore how the practice of diagnosis places bodies, and body parts into hierarchies that affect how people feel internally and see themselves in society. This is informed by my own experience of the world as an HIV positive person. My sculptural and print/ceramics work emphasizes the sculptural potential of printmaking. I see this as a metaphor for the ways that health-related information becomes embodied through reception. In printed works I use the space of the page or the structure of the book as a paste-up board for collage. Images of partial and fragmented bodies, domestic objects and institutional architecture are recurring themes that reference how ideas of health, gender, sexuality, and identity are constructed from disparate sources that can be rearranged.