This project is a three-dimensional sculptural installation of framed photographs suspended in space free from the traditional confines of the gallery wall. The work challenges the history of the photograph as a two-dimensional print on a gallery wall; an illusion of light, shadow and texture but without mass or volume. The actual objects of framed photographs of a nondescript wall in various states of destruction are the subject and the media itself used in the artistic process.

Creation of the work involved simultaneous actions destruction and reconstruction; photographing, framing and hanging; rephotographing, re-framing and rehanging; burning, painting, breaking holes through, wrapping in plastic, nailing and otherwise transforming the wall. The complexly layered photos are a simulation of the wall and the history of its various states of deconstruction and reconstruction, but are also documentation and artifacts of the process itself. The photos of the wall are simulations of themselves, impossible to grasp, as the Kantian “thing in itself”.

 

The use of ordinary everyday materials and the tension between sculptural elements and flatness of the picture plane recalls works by Robert Rauschenberg, while vandalism as an act of individual artistic practice references both Duchamp and John Divola. The work is also a documentation of its own time-consuming production spanning more than a year.