One of the recurring challenges for Artament, Cinema Center’s popular annual auction of ornaments created by local artists, has always been how best to display the wares for the benefit of potential bidders.

Now that problem is solved for all eternity or for the foreseeable future, whichever comes first.

Cinema Center has officially expanded into the space in the Hall Community Arts Center formerly occupied by Artlink and will put it to many uses, among them hosting parties that require auction-friendly wall space.

The eighth annual Artament starts at 6 p.m. Saturday. For information, call 426-3456.

Cinema Center’s executive director, Catherine Lee, says 57 local artists have submitted work, and while all of it is ornament-related, not much of it is holiday-related.

Artament is a lot of things, but it’s not a place to go if you’re looking for ornaments titled “I Can Haz Christmas” or “Pawn Stars Under the Mistletoe.”

It’s a place to go to acquire conversation pieces, as long as you are not afraid of conversations that begin, “What in the name of Yukon Cornelius is that?”

Case in point: Justin Henry Miller’s “Franky Facemelter.”

It’s an ornament that will thrill cineastes but may disturb some Christmas purists.

It pays tribute to the scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” when the face of a Gestapo interrogator turns into soup.

“It’s so spectacular,” Lee says. “I have no idea who is going to want to own it, but it’s really cool. Whoever ends up owning it may want to hang it more at Halloween than Christmas.”

If there’s a gamut bounded on one end by “Franky Facemelter,” Lee says the rest of the ornaments run that gamut.

“Some are beautiful and sweet; some of them are outrageous and really ‘out there,’ ” she says. “And there’s a lot of stuff in the middle. We really get to see the creativity of people in town when they get to take on a fun project like this.”

A gallery of photos of the ornaments can be found at www.cinemacenter.org/Artament2011.

The latest edition of Artament is only the first step in the fun project that is Cinema Center’s expansion.

Lee and the Cinema Center board are currently working up a business plan for the use of the new space, which she says will be a site of “fun and cheesy extensions of what we do.”

Some of the probable, possible and pie-in-the-sky extensions, Lee says, include readings, live music, informal screenings, educational programming, live transmissions, Super Bowl parties and pingpong.

Cinema Center may also offer the space as a rental, although, Lee says, “we want to make film a strong element in everything we do.”

“But there is hardly anything that goes on in the world that hasn’t had a cool film made about it,” she says.

Lee says she sees Cinema Center and the Hall Community Arts Center as being participants in the “arts campus” project being developed on East Main Street by Arts United and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art.

“We are a little bit further East, but only a couple of blocks,” she says.

An arts campus, as defined by Arts United executive director Jim Sparrow, is a place to which creative people are drawn regardless of what events are happening there, and Lee says she hopes that the expanded Cinema Center will one day become the sort of place where people are inclined to just drop in and eat their lunches while watching whatever happens to be showing on the second screen.

One of the major investments the theater will have to make sooner rather than later, Lee says, is the purchase of a digital projection system for the main auditorium.

“It’s not like we didn’t know this was coming,” Lee says. “But the speed at which this is all changing has been accelerating.

“We already have a fantastic digital sound system,” she says. “We were hoping the price of a digital projector might go down, but it hasn’t.”

At roughly $60,000, a digital projection system is a sound and durable investment, but still…

“Ouch,” Lee says.