The Aspen Art Museum presents the second major US solo exhibition of the work of critically acclaimed British artist Ceal Floyer. The exhibition will feature a selection of thirteen works spanning the years 1993–2015, curated by AAM Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director Heidi Zuckerman.
Predominantly working in the media of film and installation, Floyer’s artistic practice addresses notions of the uncanny, the humorous, and the absurd through deceptively simple means, yet to deeply nuanced effect. She often plays with the conceptual distance between recognizable everyday objects and their linguistic counterparts, as well as other clever aspects of common daily associations. Floyer is able to create scenarios and situations that encourage a veritable double take on the part of the viewer, revealing the poetry inherent in the everyday and calling attention to the relationship between how we hear to what we see. In her work Door (1995), for example, a slide projector is aimed at the bottom of a door to give the appearance of light coming from the other side, allowing both the apprehension of an easily discovered trope, yet evocative of imaginative possibilities or even an unknown presence. In the work Solo (2006), she playfully deploys a hairbrush—the universally ageless stand-in for a microphone for lip-synching, mirror pop, and rock stars around the globe—installed on a professional stage-performance-ready microphone stand. Solo humorously collapses the distance between each objects’ real roles in different worlds while also acknowledging a conflated realm in which intimate activity acknowledges public performance and private fantasy becomes shared reality.
Ceal Floyer (b. 1968) received her BA from Goldsmiths College, London. Her solo exhibitions have taken place at institutions such as: the Kunstmuseum, Bonn, Germany (2015); Museion, Bozen, Italy (2014); the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2013); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2010); and Kunst-Werke, Berlin (2009). In 2007, Floyer was awarded the Nationalgalerie Berlin’s Prize for Young Art, and in 2009, the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize. Her work was also included in the Venice Biennale (2009), the Singapore Biennial (2011), and Documenta 13 (2012), and was most recently presented as part of the 2016 edition of Manifesta (11) in Zurich.
