Ceal Floyer · 303 Gallery W. 21st    Apr 18 - Jul 31, 2009

303 Gallery is proud to present our second exhibition of new work by Ceal Floyer, in which she continues to break down the semiotics of everyday signals, particularly as they are expressed through the ambiguities of language. Often suffused with a distinctly wry sense of humor, Floyer’s works are one step left of centre, with the dialectical tension inherent in commonplace representation being teased into revelatory notional compositions.

In “Scale,” Floyer exploits the dual meanings of the title itself, verb and noun, as speakers serially mounted to conjure escalating steps play the sound of footsteps ascending and descending. The footsteps scale the speakers, while the speakers play back a new kind of “scale” - liminal rather than musical. The unclad simplicity of the installation, with the speakers acting as cold, perfect channels of delivery physically turned on their sides, typifies the figurative turning, re-examining and combining of the heretofore unremarkable stimuli with which the world bombards us.

Polemically similar is “Ink on Paper”, in which various pens and markers are held to individual sheets of paper until their ink runs dry. The ink traces perfect circles with varying densities and temperatures of color as each pen purges its contents. The perfectly synthesized utility of two everyday objects is rerouted through a new pragmatic system, resulting in a different kind of purity - one that was implied by the figure of speech referenced in the piece’s title. In this way, Floyer’s practice continues to reveal the mystical potential that is always already present in the objects that surround us.

Ceal Floyer has currently a solo exhibition at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo as part of the project “Gakona.” Later this year, she will have a solo retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami. She has recently had solo exhibitions at Musei dArte Contemporanea Donna Regina, Naples; Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona; and the Swiss Institute, New York. She will be included in the 53rd International Venice Biennale this summer, and has participated in group shows in the past year at Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel,; De Ateliers, Amsterdam; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; Statens Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark; and the Turin Triennial. Floyer lives and works in Berlin.