Transition Gallery Unit 25a Regent Studios, 8 Andrews Road, London E8 4QN

Sluice Art Fair – October 2013

The Dream Machine

 Kirsty Buchanan, Sarah Cleaver, Sarah Doyle, Paul Kindersley, Cathy Lomax, Alex Michon, Travis Riley, Alli Sharma, Corinna Spencer, Charlotte Squire, Mimei Thompson

‘Even though life isn’t black and white it often looks better that way.’

Barry Gifford

 Behind every starry silver screen performance there is a real person who has been sucked into the machinery, restyled and re-presented in a recreated environment as the hero or villain of our dreams. Since the early 20^th century Hollywood has transformed these mere mortals into gods, stripping them of their skeleton-laden identities and grinding them out as perfect, plastic covered, star shaped deities. This machine of dreams is of course a charade, and the cinema is a place where nothing is as it seems, a place where the real is always mingled with the imagined.

The Dream Machine is a group show of nine artists who inspired by the black and white magic of early cinema, juxtapose the glamorous imagery, PR driven myths and dreamlike stage sets with the downbeat behind-the-scenes construction and all-too-frequent real life tragedy that is the reality of Hollywood’s dream machine. Because as Joan Crawford said ‘You manufacture toys, you can’t manufacture stars.’