Movie Palace is an elaborate kinetic sculpture that combines Hollywood escapism with the innocent pleasures of windup toys. Nostalgia powers this piece, creating a sense of the shared experience that movie going once held and which has largely disappeared from American culture today. Crafting this lost world in miniature rekindles the kind of magic that films once had, when they transported audiences to distant lands and improbable adventures. The building combines the Renaissance, Moorish, and Egyptian styles that movie houses shamelessly borrowed in the ‘good old days’. Reliefs on the outside of the dome represent Film Noir, Westerns, Musicals and other genres from Hollywood’s golden age. Inside, animated figures talk and eat popcorn while King Kong swats at biplanes from the mast of the Empire State Building. The fantasy world of film may no longer hold this kind of thrall, but Beck’s Movie Palace conjures this past so tangibly as to be transportive.
Movie Palace, 1990
mixed media construction
84" × 40" × 22"