303 Gallery is proud to present our third exhibition of new work by Ceal Floyer. Floyer’s varied installations employ sound, found objects and sculpture, often subtly manipulating common objects in the exploration of a more ambiguous, contextual reality.
In “Do Not Remove,” a single sign featuring a red diagonal cross bar and the words “Do Not Remove” is affixed to the wall. Surrounding the sign is a grid of small holes of the type that would be left in the wall after the removal of the sign itself. Only one sign remains, orphaned from its implied neighbors, an instruction as well as its own negation. This dry, vaguely maudlin humor is employed again in “Line Busy,” a wall of speakers playing the uninterrupted busy signal tone of a failed telephone call. The black line of speakers is a visual exponent of the pure tone itself, a seeming void from which a signal emanates. Floyer’s dialectical transformations engage the viewer in a sensory game, as the known, expected, and reified jarringly compete in an attempt to parse some sort of tangible certainty.
The exhibition also includes “Page 8680 of 8680,” a stack of 8,680 sheets 8.5 x 11 printer paper stacked as if to resemble a plinth that would normally support a sculpture or vitrine. Each sheet is imprinted with a number, from 1 through 8,680, an identifying marker of the logical atomism into which all objects break down. A wry send-up of minimalism, as well as the institution of art itself, the piece becomes an absurdist paean to materials themselves, as well as a nod to the polemics of simplicity. The deceptively simple “Ladder” treads similar ground - a standard industrial ladder from which all the rungs except the top and bottom have been removed. Turning a functional object into minimalist sculpture is standard practice, but the sly aesthetic reflection on the powers of “high and low” in a social art context bespeak a certain subversion of the understood.
Ceal Floyer was born in 1968. She graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1994 and has exhibited widely throughout the world. Her work has been seen in solo exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, MADRE, Naples, KW Institute for Contemporary Arts, Berlin, MoCA Miami and CCA Tel Aviv, Isreal. In 2007 she was awarded the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art. Her work is in major museum collections including Tate Modern, London, MoMA, New York and Koc Family Foundation, Istanbul. Ceal Floyer lives and works in Berlin.