“Please” is a photographic series recreating the last sixteen paintings that Edouard Manet painted as he was dying of syphilis. Manet’s sixteen paintings were diminutive in size and each depicted a bouquet of fresh flowers in glass vases. For the photographic series, each vase has been remade by hand by a glass blower, and each flower arrangement has been meticulously researched, reproduced, and replicated flower by flower, stem by stem, bloom by bloom and photographed in the same position that each rests in Manet’s original paintings. Further, the photographs have then been enlarged to the exact dimensions of the existing Manet paintings. For the exhibition the hand blown vases are displayed on an antique table from the same period that the paintings were painted, empty and as objects in and of themselves. All sixteen photographic reproductions and ten vases are viewed after entering a labarinthian Chinese Box display wallpapered in a faux marble pattern and the ultimate display affords two period style iron cast mirrors creating an infinity mirror effect of the photos and vases. Further, in the annex space, the blooms of the flowers used in the photo shoot have been dried and each bouquet’s filings have been placed in empty Pace Picante jars and are displayed on another antique table from the 19th century and reflect the position of the commissioning venue, Artpace in San Antonio, Texas. Lastly, there is photo from the Dallas Museum of Art, which in its Decorative Arts, houses one of the Manet paintings replicated, in a house reproduced originally owned by Coco Chanel, which was sold, domiciled, but eventually donated by Wendy and Emory Reeves. The Manet painting is missing from that photo, and like the Pace Picante jars alludes to the role of collector, patron, artist, venue—something Manet was very much interested. Finally, the title is extrapolated from a Peter Schjeldahl’s essay, “Edouard Manet”, in which he describes the painter as a man who simply wanted to please the viewing public while at the same time tackling subjects as diverse or interconnected as the wealth, remembrance, love, sex, death, loss. The installation aims to play on ideas of “please”, both pleasure and its instructive salutation, at the same time it questions the roles of sponsor, collector, artist, viewer, context.