Sysco's expertise was called upon recently when the British Museum wanted to stage its current Michelangelo Drawings - a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to follow the evolution of some of the world's most celebrated artworks.
The exhibition traces 60 years of Michelangelo's stormy life, from intimate studies made when he was in his early 20's to the visionary Crucifixion scenes carried out shortly before his death. Featuring 90 drawings the exhibition pulls together one of the world's largest collections of Michelangelo's work in 30 years (including three studies for the fresco in the Sistine Chapel).
Design company Metaphor was tasked with helping audiences make the connection between the three 90cm high drawings and the artist's final oversized figures. To achieve this the company created a stretch Barrisol suspended 'virtual ceiling'; at 2.5m high it is roughly the height of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
But Metaphor realised that high-level projectors were needed to bring this stunning, absorbing collection of Michelangelo's full sized drawings and samples of the finished work to life in a series of images.
Sysco technical manager, Graeme Bunyan says: "The challenge was presented to us by the Museum, and once we knew they wanted to project onto the ceiling we had a couple of months of development time with the Museum and Metaphor, deciding how we would implement this, given the limited throw distance."
Sysco's solution was to use a contained, rear projection system - folding the beam via a giant concealed foil mirror set at 45° to deflect the image offset and on axis at 90°. To achieve the optimum impact, they specified the Christie LX40, fitted with a 0.8:1 fixed wide angle lens.
"What makes this installation so interesting is that by adopting this approach, we had to work with a limited throw distance and a mirror measuring over 1.8m wide," says Bunyan. "Furthermore, we had to get the mirror and projector assembly in prior to the Barrasol ceiling, with its custom frame; thus all the measurements had to be precise and the projector lined up perfectly as there was no margin for error."
Sysco realised they would be unable to adjust the mirror or projector once the ceiling was in place "although we were able to use some slight tweaks in the Christie menu setting to get the horizontal width." Any major changes, said Bunyan, would have distorted the artwork.
Contained within the full ceiling measurement of 8m x 2.1m is the 3m x 2.1m projected image. "We were limited to the width of image as the Barissol ceiling frame required some steel reinforcement in the middle due to the screen being under considerable tension," he said. "But run with the wide angled lens the LX40 produces sufficient light and excellent quality - Christie provides us with excellent colour balance control. "We have used it hundreds of times before so we know it is reliable and has an excellent choice of lens available."
The show is controlled automatically from a PC running Director, with DVI interface. "This delivers an excellent sharp image," said Graeme. "The LX40 handles DVI really nicely and the projector gave us full colour balance control. The result is a subtle animated, looped slideshow with sketch dissolves to the original roughs, scaled from large images of the Sistine Chapel. Sysco also supplied four 23" widescreen touch screens for the exhibition.
Bunyan says: "The Museum is really happy with the system, and the show - which lasts for three months - is sold out.
"We've worked on over half a dozen key exhibitions for the British Museum and it's a place we like to work in ... although it's not often you can say you have worked on something that had such a profound effect on history."
(Chris Henry)
