I am an Assistant Professor of Photography in the School of Art and Visual Studies at the University of Kentucky. Previously, I was the Photography Fellow at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia.

My work considers how personal psychology lives within a social ecology. It is an endeavor to comprehend events and experiences lost to the past or augmented through oral history and mythmaking. The surface reminds us that an artwork is a stand-in, that representation has limits. Photographs don’t cure amnesia, they attempt to fill in the gaps. It is the process of reenactment, an action of tracing history, that is most vicarious: wearing a sequined dress at the Ruby Red Ball, listening to opera with Greg, developing film in a lab at Castro and 18th, feeling where testicles are situated under a corset, receiving my uncle’s postcard in the mail, dated 1978, that said:

I think I learned a little bit about Eden....
See you in the future,
Love Michael Kelley