The Extent of Nothingness: One Man, Thousand began as an experiment with the relationship between the photographic image and wooden logs commonly known as Cyber in Ghana. Familiar within building, construction, trade, and export, these logs ordinarily exist within an industrial and economic context. In this work, however, they are removed from that expected function and brought into an encounter with portraiture.
The project developed from my interest in how artists have continually challenged the conventional surface of the image and expanded the possibilities of artistic process. Claude Monet’s repeated paintings of the Rouen Cathedral demonstrated how returning to the same subject could reveal changing conditions of perception, while Robert Rauschenberg’s extensive experiments with image transfer brought photographs and everyday imagery into unexpected relationships with materials and surfaces. These approaches became useful points of reference as I began questioning what happens when a photographic portrait is transferred onto a surface that refuses the flatness traditionally associated with photography.
By transferring images onto the rounded surfaces of the logs, I became increasingly attentive to the physical interaction between image and material — the grain of the wood, its weight, curvature, texture, previous function, and the difficulties created by working on a circular substrate. The photograph can no longer behave as it would on paper or a flat wall. It must negotiate the material it inhabits.
The circular form makes a complete view impossible. A face wraps around the log, appearing from one position and disappearing from another. The viewer must physically move around the work in order to encounter different parts of the sitter, yet no single position reveals the entire portrait. Repetition further complicates this experience: one sitter appears across multiple logs, producing fragments, variations, and echoes of the same presence : one man becoming thousand.
What initially began as a material problem gradually developed a deeper philosophical significance. The fragmented portrait suggested the difficulty, and perhaps impossibility, of ever fully knowing another person. It also began to speak to the ways memory, grief, experience, and identity are rarely carried as complete narratives. We remember through fragments, repetitions, absences, and partial encounters.
Installed upright, the wooden logs begin to assume a bodily presence of their own. They stand in relation to one another, the architecture, and the viewer, shifting photography from an image observed frontally into something that must be walked around and experienced spatially. The sitter is present through the photographic image, yet physically absent. The wooden object becomes the meeting point between these two conditions.
The circularity of the form also became connected to the sitter’s journey through the circle of life and to the profound shifts that occur within an individual’s existence. As the image repeatedly appears, disappears, and reappears around the logs, the portrait becomes less about fixing a person at a particular moment and more about transformation, continuity, memory, and the instability of human presence.
The Extent of Nothingness marked an important turning point in my exploration of expanded portraiture. It moved my attention away from photography solely as a representation of appearance and toward photography as a material encounter between image, object, body, space, and time.
Through this work, I continue to ask: How does form change the meaning of a photographic image? How can absence acquire physical presence? And how can a photographic image inhabit an object and transform it into a vessel of memory?