Large-Scale Inflatables
For 20 years, Jon and Nicole Goldman built inflatable sculptures with their production company, GoldmanArts. The sculptures were seen on buildings throughout the US, Japan, Korea and other Pacific Rim nations. Their inflatable artwork also appeared on television, in theatrical performances (Laurie Anderson's,e.g.) and in/on museums around the US.
Dreaming Seas of Wheat, from 1985 was a series of 25 inflatable “stalks” “planted” in a grid of 5×5 each stalk was 25’ tall and about 2 feet in diameter. The piece was installed in Bullough’s Pond in Newton, Massachusetts first then in the lagoon at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Filled with helium, the stalks moved in the wind, imitating in a fanciful way, the opening scene of Werner Herzog’s film “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” which completely captured my imagination with a long single shot of a wheat field moving like the ripples of waves on the sea while the words were subtitled:
“Don’t you hear that horrible screaming all around you? That screaming men call silence.” [from The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser]
![Dreaming Seas of Wheat [San Francisco]](https://goldmanarts.com/wp-content/uploads/DSW-SF.jpg)
This large-scale bright yellow Urchin was a commission for the Japanese company PARCO as part of Jon Goldman’s AIR AQUARIUM series of inflatable sculptures. Ultimately the big yellow urchin was installed in Hibarigaoka, outside of Tokyo on the roof of it brand new vertical mall owned by Art-forward PARCO.
In a series of inflatable sculpture based on fields called DREAMING SEAS OF WHEAT, Goldman used helium and extruded polyethylene wheat colored tubular forms “planted” in a 5 x 5 arrangement with each “stalk” 25-feet high and anchored with sandbags in two sites: one in San Francisco at the Exploratorium at its former site at the Palace of Legion of Honor, and in Bullough’s Pond in Newton, Massachusetts.
