The Paradise Institute is an exhibit featured at Emily Carr University’s Concourse Gallery. It was originally made to represent Canada in 2001 at the 49th Venice Biennale where the exhibit met with rave reviews . It was awarded the “La Biennale di Venezia Special Award” for its “..involving the audience in a new cinematic experience where fiction and reality, technology and the body converge into multiple and shifting journeys through space and time.”. Created by Janet Cardiff and George Bures in 2001, the Paradise Institute stands at almost three by eleven and a height of almost three meters. The Plywood exterior creates an unusual shape for the content on the interior and there are two doors on either side the open into what appears to be a small but “modest” size theatre. The two seats “overlook” the floor-seats of an old style Hollywood-like cinema. The entire layout of the inside creates one of the most unique and involving art pieces featured from Canadian artists.

Cardiff and Bures have created an alternative reality. From the outside it looks like a misshaped plywood box. The focal point takes place on the inside, however, when you are lead through a door and into two seats; from there you slip on a pair of head phones. At the front is a screen. It is projecting a video about a young man trapped in a hospital. Slowly you become aware of sounds and for thirteen minutes you are taken into false reality. In the tiny room you being to doubt your senses. The screen on screen-like setup that Cardiff and Bures have constructed creates a sense of doubt within people whom believe that the room is empty. But is it really? There are rustling of clothes, moving shoes, and a mix of audible conversation. Although with the lights on it seems rather cozy the effects of the screens and lights begin to faze your imagination. It seems like this is just an actual theatre. The mixing is excellent in blinding the line between reality and illusion. Cardiff and Bures have been successful in creating a surreal environment.

This exhibit plays greatly on peoples own sense of reality, sights, and sounds. The make up of the theatre is constructed in such a way as to play on those senses and peoples doubts. Are you really alone in the theatre? There is a row of balconies to both sides and and couple of rows of seats. The layouts makes it seem as if the theatre is much larger than it is. The outside hardly looks big enough for all of this? I really enjoyed the use of space and detail. I couldn’t have imagined being about to create something like this. Although some sounds were a bit to audible I really felt that I was losing my mind a bit. How the screens were setup made it difficult to see the inside for what it really was. Instead I found myself getting lost in the sounds of this theatre. Both Cardiff and Bures have created an involving exhibition/

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