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Ceal Floyer
Floyer uses light, sound, video, and live performance to make spare interventions into existing situations. Her works with light include projections of illusory images onto walls and floors that gently subvert our usual viewing habits. With formal modesty and ordinary materials, Floyer introduces slight shifts that cause double takes, asking us to look more closely to confirm, or deny, the information supplied by our senses. In Day for Night (2001; above), two ordinary desk lamps shine brightly against a wall. Titled after the film technique of using photographic filters to make daylight resemble night, the piece uses warm and cool bulbs whose respective light temperatures blend into one another, effectively canceling themselves out. Highlight (2006; below) presents a blue balloon on the floor with a single bright reflection. Further exploration reveals that the highlight is an image thrown from the nearby projector. The balloon’s surface was dulled so that no real reflection occurred, only the illusory image. Floyer likens these playful confusions between fiction and reality to Brechtian distancing: she presents an illusion and then quickly deflates it by showing the mechanism that produces it. 
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