It's come as a bit of surprise to everyone, but just so you know:

Kim and I are getting married this Saturday, May 15 at 4:30, in a small field, in a small town, next to a small tree.

It's a bigger deal than the small details may let on.

POSTHUMOUS - Opens at American Univ. Museum - Sat., May 8, 6-8pm

POSTHUMOUS Michael Lease

May 8 - June 6, 2010
Opening: Saturday, May 8 6-8 pm

American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20016
www.american.edu\museum
202-885-1300

Hours: 11am-4pm Tuesday-Sunday

Image: Rachel (detail), 2005, color thermal print, pencil, Sharpie, wheat, water, 11x14 in.

From the curator:

Employing personal and collected snapshots, Michael Lease’s work encourages viewers to consider the cultural use of photographs. For the project Posthumous, first mounted in 2005, Lease uses his own images and recollections, turning a quasi-anthropological eye onto his own past.

Through the combination of snapshots and texts, Posthumous distills years’ worth of intimate moments between Lease, various friends, and lovers. Wheat-pasted directly to the gallery walls and coupled with hand-written vignettes, the intimate yet familiar images belie a mountain of experience beyond the frame. Simultaneously personal and universal, Posthumous asks viewers to reflect on their own pictures, weighing the similarities of these stories against their own.

Like the obituaries, public memorials, and remembrance walls that Lease credits as inspiration for the work, the gallery is used as a space in which a story about the past can be told. By inserting private images into a public space, Lease pays homage to the people that shaped him and reminds us that, no matter how we tuck them away (in boxes beneath the bed or buried on a hard drive), photographs play a pivotal role in structuring our histories


Allison Peck, Curator