Australian artist Amanda Parer’s edgy and ephemeral artworks explore the natural world, its fragility, and our role within it. San Franciscans may remember Intrude, her collection of gigantic rabbits, which invaded Civic Center Plaza in 2016.
For Inflatable, Parer Studio will install two human figures from a larger piece called Fantastic Planet. Inspired by the 1973 animated classic of the same title, it depicts immense but benign humanoids from an alien planet, beginning to inspect humans and our environment. The piece encourages us to reconsider both our own size, and our outsized impact on the natural world.
Photo: Parer Studio
Florida-based artist Jason Hackenwerth explores what he describes as “universal biology”—the curling, amorphous structures shared by nearly all living things. He twists and weaves hundreds of elongated party balloons in elaborate patterns. The enormous finished sculptures mimic patterns from nature, yet are unlike any known organism.
Hackenwerth avoids the bright colors normally associated with balloon animals, favoring organic colors. Bright greens and yellows give way to dark browns and reds, symbolizing growth and decay.
For Inflatable, Hackenwerth has designed Cauldron Veil. Its shape evokes the mouth of a prehistoric creature, or the egg sac of some unknown life form. He will build the piece at the Exploratorium in the days before the exhibition opens.
Ranging from absurd inflatable “suits,” to architectural augmentations, Jimmy Kuehnle’s inflated artworks engage his audiences with a playful sense of the unexpected. “I try to find the line between the spectacle and the absurd,” he says. “If I can make something that you can’t quite put in a category, then maybe there’s going to be a short circuit and you’ll have a genuine interaction.”
Kuenle’s art emphasizes the encounter, encouraging visitors to touch, squeeze, and play with soft and whimsical shapes.
For Inflatable, Kuehnle is developing an environment of giant cylinders illuminated from within. Visitors will explore them from all sides, wandering through them and squeezing in between.
Pneuhaus is a design collective based in Rhode Island, whose members—Matt Muller, Augie Lehrecke, and Levi Bedall—work in the fields of temporary structures, spatial design, and contemporary art to create large, immersive environments that relate to human perception and scale.
Their past creations have included domes with fabric prisms in RGB colors, and pneumatic masonry structures, with inflated interlocking spheres contained by webbed harnesses.
For Inflatable, Pneuhaus will install their Compound Camera, a geodesic dome composed of 109 inflated spherical camera obscuras. Visitors venturing inside can interact with an inverted insect-eye view of the world outside.
Taiwanese artist Shih Chieh Huang begins his artistic process with humble materials—trash bags, small fans, even pieces of garbage. He then tinkers with lights, switches, and other electronics to inflate these objects with life, making them breathe, move, and react to their environment.
Huang visited the Exploratorium in 2009 and 2010, bringing smaller works and experiments, such as Organic Concept, made from a fan and painter’s tarp.
For Inflatable, Huang will transform the Phyllis C. Wattis Webcast Studio with Guardian of the Disphotic, a dim undersea realm populated by moving, glowing octopus-like creatures made from trash bags, LED lights, highlighter pen fluid, and other household objects.
