SCA Honours Group Show, Sydney College of the Arts, 2017

The Anticipation | Honours Graduate Group Show, University of Sydney

The cinema space is unique in the way that it presents an invitation to the spectator to abandon their ordinary life and live wholly within a different world......

Within this space the curtains act as a division between reality and the illusion of a new reality presented to the audience by way of a film. Projectionists were often trained in curtain "showmanship" that made going to the cinema an extraordinary experience. Once the lights dimmed, the projector started and the curtains opened with the studio logo projected onto them. The idea was that the audience never saw the white screen concealed by the curtain without a moving image on it, so the illusion always existed behind the curtain. Upon the feature film finishing, the curtain was sequenced to time in with the end of the final fade out, once again, making the white screen invisible to the spectator. The illusion of the cinema is only maintained if the white screen is never revealed for what it actually is - simply a surface for projection.