This project is a series of framed photographs collaged together as a three-dimensional sculptural installation. The photos are images of a nondescript wall with framed photos of the wall itself hanging on the wall in frames. The framed photos are then rephotographed, framed and hung back on the wall to be rephotographed again and again in a self-referential cycle with varying states of destruction. The actual objects of framed photographs of are both subject and the media itself used in the artistic process. 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.

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Creation of the work involved simultaneous actions of 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 and the photos themselves. 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 representations of themselves, impossible to grasp, as the Kantian “thing in itself”.

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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.