DANIEL LUEDTKE
WOBBLY GRID
August 6-22, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, August 6, 5-7 pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, August 22, 3 pm
Daniel Luedtke is an interdisciplinary artist and musician living in Tallahassee, FL. He received an MFA in Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Music Performance from Augsburg University in Minnesota. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Florida State University. Luedtke’s interdisciplinary work illustrates ways that health, mortality, and bodily pleasure are quantified, categorized, and assigned value. These ideas are often illustrated by emphasizing the physicality of printed images in installations and other flat-but-dimensional objects. He has been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums such as the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Tom of Finland Foundation, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, and the Schwules Museum in Berlin. His work has been published in printmaking anthologies by Princeton Architectural Press and Chronicle Books.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Wobbly Grid is a collection of works that are metaphors for how ideal systems that control and quantify people become distorted and imperfect in the messiness of real life. The exhibition is a collection of wall-mounted ceramic/screenprint hybrid artworks, faux ceramic tiles, and screenprints that respond to the ways that health industries, diagnostic systems, and biometrics remake people into readable objects. The metaphor of the grid acts as a fixed system that produces, evaluates, and catalogs us. This is akin to the way a printmaking matrix (the woodblock, screenprint stencil, .jpg, etc.) is used to output and regulate printed information as it is multiplied, creating formal and informal networks of distribution and dissemination. Through multiplicity, a coherence of meaning is possible. Where things get off course is especially evident in the hybrid ceramic works. Printed, systematic images are pushed around irregular surfaces, distorting as they are fused onto the ceramic clay "body". In these works, the ideal forms of the image are resisted through the irregularity of volumetric space, time, and experience.