“It's strange that balloon memories are barely grown,” said DJ Morrow, one of the most avant-garde balloon artists in the United States. “It was like it was around me, and I didn't notice them,” they were like air.
Morrow, 29, lives in a small Houston apartment and makes a living as a wedding videographer. But his true passion, taken over from his parents, is balloons. He turned that passion into a career, creating temporary inflatable sculptures, unlike those seen on a typical child's birthday.
One wall of Moreau's living room/workshop is featured in a plastic box containing his hand pumps, tape measure and thousands of balloons organized in colour. During his visit in January, a rough draft of his latest work sat in the middle of the room. A blue-sized girl in a dress in a lush dress holds a German shepherd covered in thongs. All the dog's muscle groups were stalked and stalked with aggression. His teeth were exposed, and yellow eyes leapt out of his face. The girl's face was a mask of panic.
The piece entitled “The Long Night Takes Hold” “puts an image of the general helplessness I felt in the administration that came in,” saying his purple mohawk was cleaned with clamshell hair.
On a large television screen there was a photograph of a dead lamb, with the muzzle covered in blood on its side. It becomes the final element of the composition, its neck is doomed for the dog's jaw.
The room was creakful, as Moreau was working. To recreate the dead lamb, he inflated a long white balloon. He began to twist, his eyes glued to the screen, his hand clasped and his balloons inflated as smoothly as the shooter drew an arrow from the trembling.
Slowly, the lamb's jaw began to turn into shape. My head grew as tomorrow twisted and pinched, sometimes popping out.
Moreau is part of a very small balloon artist who tries to use medium to express something deep. For Moreau, his balloon journey began in Rio de Janeiro, where he was born, before moving to Taiwan and then Houston.
His parents were members of the Family of God (now called Family International), a cult founded in 1968 by David Berg, Morrow's great grandfather. Both worked on balloons. By the name Miss Sunshine, his mother still does. His father developed a latex allergy and had to stop. (“It scares me,” Moreau said.
At age 16, Moreau began learning how to twist from his mother. Two weeks later he learned a repertoire of swords, hats, dogs and teddy bears. “The standard canon of the 90s,” he said. More hungry, he began experimenting with multiple balloons on one sheet of paper. Soon he discovered the works of two balloon visionaries Matt Falloon and Rupert Appleyard, who developed a system for creating large-scale sculptures. “Being autodeduct was a big part of the cult culture,” Morrow said. (Morrows left the cult in 2012. The DJ now identifies as an atheist.)
In 2019, Morrow twisted the life-size sculpture of a sad clown, making his first foray into the inflatable Pathos. It was inspired by his inner life.
“I dealt with a lot of depression,” he said. “But as a celebrity, I was always pressured to look happy.” For the first time, he unleashed the gravity of his balloon sculpture.
This work was not widely viewed. However, later that year, when he made a massive copy of Francisco Goya's “Saturn Devours His Son,” and posted it on Reddit, it became the top post on the website. “The fact that it reached number one really opened my eyes to the power to be artistically authentic,” he said. Soon Moreau twisted the balloons into a massive recreation of Francis Bacon's ominous “After Study of Pope Innocent X's Portrait of Verazquez,” which the Pope replaced by Clarence Thomas.
Since then, Moreau has held a massive exhibition called “Out of the Strong Bonthing Sweet” at John Center in Houston.
“It represented me all the good things that came from my cult development,” Moreau said. “Samson found honey in the lion's corpse, so I was trying to save the good from experience.”
Those works, like all his sculptures, began to collapse as soon as they were finished. Preserving balloons is out of the question. “It's like preventing a body,” he said. (Morrow sells photo prints of his work on his website. The special edition operates between $300 and $600.)
“It's wonderfully artistically rich,” he was working on the delicateness of a dead lamb, but he admitted, “Financially, it's not the biggest.” He grabbed another balloon that was inflated, twisted, bent over the lamb's lower jaw, and he buoyed, adding, “It's that absurd and beautiful.”
