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Balloonery

Presented by Riverside Art Museum at Riverside Art Museum

November 17-December 31, 2006

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BALLOONERY In the spirit of the holiday season, the Riverside Art Museum is pleased to present the work of three intrepid artists who work in the unusual medium of balloons. Inland artist Mary Lou Fletcher, a graduate of Claremont, joins New York artists Holly Crawford – herself a southern California native – and Jason Hackenwerth in filling the museum’s Art Alliance Gallery with installational work fabricated entirely from balloons. Whether sculpture, architecture, or performance, art made from balloons is obviously not art conceived of as permanent. But it is conceived as art, its colors painterly, its shapes sculptural, its presence potentially all-surrounding, and its associations festive. Many artists, from Christo to Carlos Mollura, have worked with inflatable bags, and all have at least subtly exploited the fun of it all. But, like Christmas spirit itself, it’s serious fun. Inland artist (and Claremont Graduate University alumna) Mary Lou Fletcher is a professional clown, and the mischievous sensibility she brings to her day job she brings to her art as well. Her balloon objects are balloon creatures, seemingly bouncing and slithering around their allotted space like circus performers, or like pets from another planet testing out a new abode. Sometimes Fletcher’s fabulations resemble vegetation – in other words, they are the new abode. Taking the comfortable shapes of pillows, sausages, doughnuts, and stones – among other rounded, curvaceous objects – Fletcher’s amiable alien animals, and plants, mug goofily and endearingly. Holly Crawford – a New York-based, southern California-born critic, historian, editor, and theorist as well as painter, poet, and performer – presents a more austere balloon work, but infuses it with a similarly organic energy. Crawford describes her balloons as resembling “cells that come together into different spaces.” Crawford’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird – a loose homage to the Wallace Stevens poem whence it gets its name – exists as a site-specific participatory installation that exists in a given time period almost as a vignette: the installation is constructed, it goes on view for a couple of weeks, then, during the reception, is altered by popping, and is removed a week or two later. Having been installed in such locales as Florence, Berlin, Valencia (Spain), and London, this is the fifth manifestation of Thirteen Ways, and its first showing in America. It will be retired once it has taken form thirteen times. Crawford’s balloons are all black, but Jason Hackenwerth’s are at least as colorful as Fletcher’s – and, if anything, even more biomorphic. Hackenwerth’s balloon sculptures have taken the forms – and also taken off from the forms – of sea creatures, fossils, and even giant prehistoric creatures. (Indeed, one of his most recent exhibitions was held at New Haven, Connecticut’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, where he constructed immense imaginary dinosaurs.) He has also created expansive organic structures hung from the ceiling, floating high above viewers’ heads. New York-born and bred, Hackenwerth has come a long way from the days when he entertained children at the famous New York toy store F.A.O. Schwarz, and even a longer way from his studies and exhibitions as a painter. But he comes by his profession – and the exuberant performance with which he enlivens his inventions – through familial example: his mother was a weekend clown, tying balloons into animal shapes in a downtown mall. All three artists in “Balloonery,” then, are performers, even entertainers, as much as they are shape-makers. No matter how strange, rigorous, or elaborate the structures they make out of myriad inflatable latex sacs, Crawford, Fletcher, and Hackenwerth mean for their complex balloon accretions to induce a spirit not just of awe, but of giddiness. If the Bauhaus taught us that form follows function, these three artists suggest that form follows fun. Peter Frank Senior Curator

• At-a-
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  • Venue Info

    Riverside Art Museum

    3425 Mission Inn Avenue
    Riverside, CA 92501

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  • Admission Info

    Tickets: $5 donation Museum Members, Students, and Children under 12 are Free

  • Dates & Times

    Dates:
    November 17-December 31, 2006

    Times:
    10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

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