Collective Conversations
This collection of Linoleum Relief Prints were created for the "Collective Conversations" solo show at the East Arbor Architecture + Gallery from December 2016 - January 2017
The Artist Statement for the show is as follows:
Lyz Luidens is a printmaker, letterpress artist, and teacher who graduated with a BFA from U of M in 2013 and is now working in Detroit, MI. Their work focuses mainly on the interactions between people, scaled up and down, from the interpersonal to the global idea of interaction and communication between people. Most recently, they have been creating works representing the difficulties and rewards involved in the manual and emotional labor of working collectively, as their studio space and housing cooperative are both collectively run by the members.
What holds a collective effort together? When they first began working and living in collectives, in cooperative housing and shared artist spaces, Lyz was advised that it would likely not be a lack of resources or space or quantitative poverty that would ruin the collective effort to democratically serve it's members, but the interpersonal relationships between the members which would decide the fate of a group as a whole. It is the emotional labor of caring for one another in these spaces that holds them together; the sustainability of a group seeking to operate collectively, democratically, begins with the details of the relationships of it's members, the often undervalued and overlooked task of learning and re-learning to care for one another day to day. And what does that look like, on a larger scale? Lyz's work largely represents that emotional labor or lacktherof, scaled up and down between interpersonal relationships and large scale policy.
