Seeking flat reflective surface in Seattle for Pride-themed optical illusion. Or other brainstorms.

I am working on an optical illusion prop that could be positioned above a reflective surface, so that the top part would spell “LOVE” against the upper half of the Pride flag, and the (reflected) bottom half would spell “WINS” against the lower half of the Pride flag. The first pic shows the first letter above a mirror, showing how the trick works – using opposite sides of triangular prisms made from paper.

I wanted to use the reflecting pool at Cal Anderson as the reflective surface (I mean that I would set it up there, take a picture, and leave, not that I was setting up an art piece to leave there without permission). So I set up a PVC pipe rig to hold a letter above the water, but there are some problems. If you’re close to it and the angle of observance is steep (2nd pic), the water loses its reflective property and you can’t read the bottom half. If you back away so the angle of observation is shallower (3rd pic), both letters become visible in both halves. In both cases, the bright light actually reflects off of the colors on the upper half of the prisms and casts that color onto the lower half of the prisms – so that in the reflection, you actually see pink and orange, instead of blue and green, which are the colors of the sheets of paper you’re actually looking at.

So, does anyone know of a flat reflective surface, somewhere in or near Seattle, where I could position the letters to make the illusion? Maybe black marble on the ground would work better than water? Other possible workarounds: – Use the trans pride flag colors instead, which are top-to-bottom symmetrical, so you avoid the reflective color problem, and have only the letters be part of the optical illusion – Make the prisms narrower. This means you could view it from a shallower angle and still only see one image instead of both at once. But it would be harder to make the prisms narrower without the paper bending.

Finally I could just carry around four mirrors with the letters, so that it could be set up anywhere. Seems like it would be more of a cool factor to use the reflective properties of something that’s already there (especially if I could have made it work with the Cal Anderson reflecting pool in the heart of Seattle’s LGBTQ neighborhood, oops I mean Antifa Land) rather than dragging around your own mirrors. But the nice thing about that is that you could take it to an event and people could pose in groups of four holding the letters.

Any brainstorms for how to make this work or maybe take it in another whole direction?

Thanks and happy Pride!