Comprising fourteen photographs—each reproduced as 8 × 10-inch meticulously tri-tone printed, hand-tipped plates—Posthume is a quiet, contemplative body of work. Oversized in format and restrained in scope, the book is both elegy and invocation: a memento mori that gestures towards the old masters, Armijo McKnight’s queer identity, and his Mexican American heritage.
In these images, nude figures traverse or recline within stark landscapes, their faces obscured by skull masks. At once tender and unsettling, the photographs refuse easy interpretation: are these figures alive or dead? At peace or discarded? Their gestures suggest rest, ritual, mourning, and sensuality all at once. The ambiguity is not a riddle to be solved, but a space the artist holds open—for memory, desire, and transformation.
The work draws on the Western art historical tradition of the memento mori while also engaging the iconography and spiritual logic of Día de los Muertos, in which the dead are never fully gone. The skulls, then, are not only symbols of death, but masks of possibility—portals through which the living and the dead, the past and the present, the sacred and the erotic, might meet.
The book is housed in a box made from humble, utilitarian materials. It is wrapped in a custom paper created in collaboration with artisan papermakers in Oaxaca, made from native agave fibers and embedded with dried petals of the cempasúchil flower, traditionally used in Día de los Muertos altars. The gesture is tactile and symbolic: a shroud, an offering, a return to the Earth.
Published in an oversized edition of 750, each copy of Posthume is signed by the artist.
