Introduction

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.