This body of work emerges from a desire to dismantle the portrait and examine what lies beneath its surface. Rather than presenting a subject, I focus on the constructed environments where portraits traditionally occur—spaces loaded with aesthetic, psychological, and cultural expectation. By removing the figure and stripping the image of narrative cues, I draw attention to the portrait as a performative site, where identity is not just captured but staged.Using studio-lit faux wood veneers, I build deliberately artificial, portrait-ready spaces that function as both visual clichés and theatrical backdrops. These empty sets serve as stand-ins for authenticity, calling into question the mechanisms of image-making and the illusion of intimacy. The resulting photographs, devoid of human presence, become meditations on absence, potential, and the artifice of self-representation. These sets are scaled to the human body, inviting the viewer to physically and psychologically inhabit the space, the viewer becomes the subject: their presence completing the composition, their gaze activating the image.