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DJ Morrow is a serious artist who uses a decidedly unserious medium: balloons.
Morrow uses the same balloons that clowns and buskers use to make dogs and giraffes. But he creates fine art and, in particular, protest art.
“I first started doing the balloons with the fine-art bent as just a way of processing emotional things that I was going through, and heavy things I was dealing with around 2019,” he says.
A “straight-ish, very gender-nonconforming” man with a nonbinary poly-partner, Morrow made The Entertainer, a balloon sculpture of a sad Pagliacci, on a lonely Valentine’s Day in 2019. That marked a new approach for Morrow. A memorial to his late sister quickly followed. Reactions to both pieces were encouraging. And then COVID-19 hit, and art exhibits came to a screeching halt.
It wasn’t until the 2023 ArtCrawl exhibit at Hardy Nance Studios that Morrow was able to exhibit in person. His immersive installation Messengers was a groundbreaking work featuring three figures, each a self-proclaimed messenger of truth.
A dark, almost menacing piece, Messengers employed some three thousand balloons and took more than two weeks to assemble.
Reactions to Messengers ranged from awe and amazement to surprise. “Surprise is a tool in an artist’s toolbox, especially when you’re approaching topics that can be thorny and things that people don’t like to think about,” says Morrow. “It’s something that I’m very cognizant of, and I take full advantage of it. I want to create a message, whether it be a deeply political message or a socially conscious message portrayed in a different way in an unexpected medium. I think the work also demands a response just due to the unexpected use of the medium itself.”
Morrow’s most recent exhibit was Ode to a Falling Star, an inflation group show at the Locker Room in New York City. The work laments America’s descent into fascism—a topic that’s bound to generate conversation. “I’ve had a lot of heated discussions with other artists about the role of art,” says Morrow. “I’ve heard that art should be about documentation and how we see the world and providing a lens to view it from. And it should not necessarily be objective, but purely subjective in the sense of, ‘This is my perspective, and I’m not trying to demand something from the viewer.’ But I think we live in very demanding times, so I don’t think that it’s possible to make art that is truly reflective of our current situation without it also demanding something of the viewer. If you can look at society without being motivated to do something about it, I don’t know what kind of world you’re living in. I don’t have any delusions of grandeur that my art is the thing that people need and that will change the world, but I don’t want to be the only person doing this. I want to be one of the 10,000 artists who are raising their voices and radicalizing people and showing them that you can fight for change.”
Viewers can see Morrow’s newest installation, The Fount of Our Despair, which he describes as “a cool, spooky fantasy scene,” this month at the Beer Can House. For more info, visit balloonsinbold.com
WHAT: “The Fount of Our Despair” installation
WHERE: The Beer Can House, 222 Malone
WHEN: September 19–21
INFO: full.orangeshow.org
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