Ringling College of Art and Design graduate Christian Sampson has filled Marie Selby Botanical Gardens with glowing panels that warp visitors' views of the orchids like funhouse mirrors. The site-wide exhibition of dichroic film, glass and acrylic stretches across the conservatory, mansion and gardens at Selby's downtown Sarasota campus.

The show, titled "Super Ghost Orchid," is this year's edition of the gardens' annual Orchid Show. It opened Oct. 10 and runs through Dec. 6 at 900 S. Palm Ave.

Sampson, a Bradenton native who graduated from Ringling College in 1998, is known for installations of color, light and form. His primary material is dichroic film, a thin polyester containing microscopic layers of metallic oxides that manipulate light waves, according to Ringling College. The panels shift and distort the view through them, sometimes mirroring it. Visitors see the plants through what the college described as "a kind of cinematic filter."

The creative process took about two years of dialogue between Sampson and the Selby team, the Sarasota Observer reported.

The installations fill several locations. Inside the Richard and Ellen Sandor Museum of Botany & the Arts, a selection of Sampson's works is on display alongside a short film he created. His 9-year-old daughter, Agatha Dill Sampson, performs interpretive dances of five orchids in the film, the Observer reported. She wears costumes designed by Sampson's wife, artist Ariel Dill, according to Ringling College. Rotating discs project fragments of the film around the room.

Additional pieces sit in the gardens and in the Display Conservatory, where they frame living orchids and other epiphytes.

The exhibition takes its name from the largest known specimen of the rare ghost orchid, which lives high in a bald cypress tree at the National Audubon Society's Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary near Naples. That plant has produced multiple flowers every year since its discovery in 2007, according to Ringling College. The leafless orchid was a subject of interest to orchidologist Carlyle Luer, a founding trustee of Selby Gardens, who described it in his 1972 book The Native Orchids of Florida.

Sampson also drew inspiration from rare volumes in Selby Gardens' Nathalie McCulloch Research Library. Among them: Der Orchideengarten, a German pulp magazine published between 1919 and 1921 that is often considered the world's first fantasy magazine.

Jennifer Rominiecki, president and CEO of Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, told MySuncoast the annual show aims to connect nature and the arts. David Berry, the gardens' vice president for visitor experience, described the dichroic film as having "a kind of prismatic effect" that casts color throughout the space.

Sampson's work has been exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Sarasota Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg and galleries across New York. Sarasota Magazine reported his piece Vita in Motu is on permanent view at the Sarasota Art Museum. The Ringling College source says he divides his time between Los Angeles and Sarasota, while other accounts describe Los Angeles as his primary base.

Each visit looks different. The dichroic panels change with the light, the time of day and the angle at which they are viewed.