The collaboration of Sigrid Lauren and me under Rita Minissi’s invitation and leadership is instrumental in these ponderings. Rita’s self and other series strikes me and my experience in a way I can relate to collaborative screenprinting production I’ve spent my career examining and perfecting. Relying on others is mandatory physically and psychologically. These concepts revolve around that idea in a historical context as well.

Zine by Leslie Diuguid in collaboration with Rita Minissi, Luther Davis, and Krysta Eder. Poster by Rita Minissi self and other, 2015 in collaboration with Sigrid Lauren and Leslie Diuguid.

Power always comes with an agenda.  Vast and varied throughout history, the constant is that power, and therefore, the authority, has always labeled the “other” as a threat.  

Technological advances over the centuries and across continents have increased productivity and fluidity of information.  With new structures and new powers of growing economies, comes new and varied disparities.  Technology does not solve social problems.  Creativity is a construction: the assembly of something new out of known parts.  Along with fantasy, we are able to imagine beyond present and fact to new images and concepts and potentials - creating something new beyond the known. 

A construction unites images and representation, symbol and history, icon and narrative in a conception that moves its audience to complete and extend the construction; it is this sense that construction adds to its perceiver's life it makes it possible for individuals and perhaps therefore society, though more slowly--to grow. To acknowledge that our constructions are not mysterious emanations with lives of their own, but rather 'willed human work,' is to acknowledge the communities of contestation and constraint within which we work together, and which we construct will progress.