Move Over, Jeff Koons, There’s a New Balloon Sculpture in Town
As I peered into the gargantuan tangle of 50 multicolored inflatables comprising the centerpiece of CJ Hendry’s Keff Joons exhibition, an attendant named Tim gave me a heads-up. “Only a few more seconds of silence,” he said.
Moments later, as if on cue, two small children and an adult, all wearing socks, rushed into the all-white padded room. The kids made a beeline for the 20-foot-tall mess of air-filled knots and instinctively began to climb an oversized pink tentacle resting on the floor. As their hands and feet made contact with its surface, the blanket of silence was replaced with sounds of squeaking vinyl. The adult asked Tim if he could take a picture before darting away to join the children, who had begun to traverse a labyrinth of blue and white blow-ups.
More visitors trickled in and, without hesitation, plunged into the cavities of the buoyant monolith. The room swelled with gleeful shrieks and multiplying laughs, and soon the entire nest of balloons was bouncing and swaying with a crowd of all ages.
An overblown take on Jeff Koons’s overrated balloon dog sculptures, Hendry’s Keff Joons show transforms a seemingly unassuming warehouse at 50 Gold Street in Brooklyn’s Vinegar Hill neighborhood into an air-filled rainbow playground that looks like it was pulled from a clown’s wildest dreams. The interactive show, open daily from 10am to 5pm through April 20, is free to the public with admission based on a first-come, first-serve basis — which has resulted in long lines averaging roughly an hour or more wait times for a 15-minute entry.
Although its anchored by the massive climbable installation sitting smack-dab in the center, the exhibition also includes nine hyper-realistic balloon drawings, priced between $48,990 and $220,000 and already sold-out, according to the artist’s website; a three-foot resin sculpture priced at $85,000 (also sold); and prints priced at $790 (all sold). Veering in the direction of a carnival attraction, the exhibition also offers an array of souvenirs for purchase, including $245 silk scarves, $45 balloon packs, $15 magnets, and $10 enamel pins.
The installation’s Instagrammable quality runs a thread through Hendry’s past work, which include a series of rooms that corresponded with crumpled Pantone color swatch drawings, an Olympic-sized swimming pool in the middle of the Las Vegas desert, and another inflatable maze installation that centered on squishable Rorschach works.
And like these previous endeavors, Keff Joons is not simply an exhibition, but an entire production that requires daily maintenance from an entire fleet of workers. (Hendry declined to disclose the budget for this show, and when I asked to speak with her, a PR team told me she was “not doing any more interviews” — a response that struck me as contrary to the welcoming quality her work suggests.)
Dylon Harbottle, the artist’s studio director, told me that the entire installation is cleaned every night, a process which generally takes five to six hours to complete and is done by deflating and re-inflating each balloon individually.
“We use color as our guide,” Harbottle explained. In addition to this, the balloons are regularly re-inflated every few days when they begin to lose air.
When I asked if there have been any injuries, Harbottle responded that there have “been some tumbles,” but no one has been hurt. “ Kids are very bouncy, and so are the balloons,” he quipped.
But it should be noted that children aren’t the only ones enjoying the show. Rickina Brooks, 38, who was visiting with her younger sister and three teenage relatives earlier this week, told me that it was a fun activity worth the 40-minute wait in line. Initially, she thought it would be “babyish,” until she decided to give it a try.
“ I let my inner child out,” Brooks said, though admitted that it made her nervous to climb too high.
Another pair of attendees, Jessica Ursino and her daughter Stella, said they were in line for an hour. Stella said she preferred to stay low to the ground and climb through the tunnels.
“ I didn’t think that I would wanna climb and crawl through it,” Ursino said, watching her nephews, who were still climbing the balloon pile, swinging from inflatable to inflatable. “But I loved it.”
