Lifestyle
Balloon Art You Won’t Find at a Children’s Birthday Party
“It’s funny how little memory I have of balloons growing up,” said DJ Morrow, one of the greatest avant-garde balloon artists in the United States. “It’s almost like because it was around me constantly I didn’t even notice them.” They were, that is, like air.
Morrow, 29, lives in a small apartment in Houston, and makes his living as a wedding videographer. But his true passion, passed down from his parents, is balloons. He has transformed that passion into a career creating ephemeral inflatable sculptures unlike those seen at a typical child’s birthday.
One wall of Morrow’s living room/workshop is taken up by plastic boxes containing his hand pumps, tape measures and thousands and thousands of balloons, organized by color. During a visit in January, a rough draft of his most recent piece sat in the middle of the room: a life-size girl in a blue pinafore dress holding a snarling German shepherd by the leash. Every muscle group of the dog was taut, striated in aggression. Its teeth were bared and its yellowed eyes popped from its face. The girl’s face was a mask of panic.
The piece, titled “The Long Night Takes Hold,” “puts an image to the sense of general helplessness that I was feeling with the incoming administration,” said Morrow, his purple mohawk swept up with a clamshell hair claw.
On a large television screen was a photograph of a dead lamb, on its side, its muzzle bloodied. It will become the final element of the composition, its neck destined for the jaws of the dog.
As Morrow worked, the room filled with squeaks. To recreate the dead lamb, he inflated long white balloons. He began twisting, eyes glued to the screen, hands grasping and inflating balloons as smoothly as an archer draws an arrow from a quiver.
Slowly the form of a lamb’s jaw began to take shape. As Morrow twisted and pinched, and occasionally popped, a head grew.
Morrow is part of a very small cadre of balloon artists seeking to use the medium to express the profound. For Morrow, his ballooning journey began in Rio de Janeiro, where he was born, before moving to Taiwan and later Houston.
His parents were members of the Family of God (now called Family International), the cult founded by Morrow’s great-great-grandfather, David Berg, in 1968. They both worked with balloons. His mother, under the name Miss Sunshine, still does. His father developed a latex allergy and had to quit. (“That terrifies me,” Morrow said.)
At 16, Morrow began learning how to twist from his mother. After two weeks, he had learned her repertoire of swords, hats, dogs and teddy bears — “the standard canon of ’90s shapes,” he said. Hungry for more, he began experimenting with multiple balloons in a single piece. Soon he discovered the work of Matt Falloon and Rupert Appleyard, two balloon visionaries who developed systems to create large-scale sculptures. “Being an autodidact was a big part of the cult’s culture,” Morrow said, “so I really began to expand my balloon knowledge quickly.” (The Morrows left the cult in 2012; DJ now identifies as an atheist.)
In 2019, Morrow twisted a life-size sculpture of a sad clown, his first foray into inflatable pathos. It was inspired by his inner life.
“I was dealing with a lot of depression,” he said, “but, as an entertainer, I was constantly under pressure to put on a happy face.” For the first time, he unlocked balloon sculpture’s gravitas.
The piece wasn’t widely seen. But later that year, when he created a large reproduction of Francisco Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son” and posted it to Reddit, it became the top post on the website. “The fact that it got to the number one really opened my eyes to the power of being artistically genuine,” he said. Soon Morrow was twisting balloons into large recreations of Francis Bacon’s disturbing “Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X” with the pope replaced by Clarence Thomas.
Since then, Morrow has mounted large-scale exhibitions, including one at the Jung Center in Houston called “Out of the Strong Something Sweet,” which explored his childhood as a member of a cult and featured balloon sculptures of Samson wrestling with a lion.
“It represented to me all the good things that came out of my cult upbringing,” Morrow said. “It was me trying to salvage the good from the experience, as Samson did finding honey in the lion’s carcass.”
Those pieces, like all of his sculptures, began to decay as soon as they were finished. Preserving the balloons is out of the question. “It would be like embalming a corpse,” he said. (Morrow sells prints of photographs of his work on his website. Special editions run between $300 and $600.)
“It’s wonderfully artistically enriching,” he said as he worked on finessing the dead lamb, but he admitted that, “financially, it’s not the greatest.” Grabbing another balloon that he inflated, twisted and bent into a lamb’s mandible, he added, buoyantly, “It is beautiful in its absurdity though.”
Phil Pritchard of the Hockey Hall of Fame works the 2019 NHL Awards at the Mandalay Bay Events Center on June 19, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
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This week’s show was recorded in Chicago with host Peter Sagal, judge and guest scorekeeper Alzo Slade, Not My Job guest Phil Pritchard and panelists Alonzo Bodden, Adam Burke, and Dulcé Sloan. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.
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The Don Vs The Poppa; World’s Worst Doctor; Should We Eat That?
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Our panelists tell three stories about someone missing a huge opportunity in the news, only one of which is true.
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Peter talks to Phil Pritchard, the NHL’s Keeper of the Stanley Cup. Phil plays our game called, “Let’s Go Visit The NHL” Three questions about National Historic Landmarks.
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The Trump Dump and Air Traffic Control Becomes Animal Control
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Paul W. Downs can’t help it that even on the weekends, his life intersects with “Hacks,” the HBO comedy he co-created and co-showruns with his wife, Lucia Aniello, and their friend Jen Statsky. (He also appears on the show as Jimmy LuSaque Jr., the besieged manager of its two stars, played by Emmy winners Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder.) The fifth and final season of “Hacks” premiered last week, but on Downs’ days off, he often finds himself at its previous filming locations or hanging out with cast members who have become like family.
In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
Downs moved to Los Angeles in 2011, but soon after, he and Aniello were hired to write (and for him to act) on the über-New York show “Broad City,” keeping them away from the West Coast for years. Now the couple live in Los Feliz, which they enjoy with their young son.
“I love Los Feliz because it’s a real neighborhood with restaurants and bars, but also feels close to nature with Griffith Park,” Downs says. “Also it’s very central to my Eastside friends and Westside agents.”
And if he had to live at a local mall, like the character Ava Daniels did in the third season of “Hacks,” which would he choose?
“It would be the Americana, obviously.”
Here’s how he’d spend a perfect day in L.A.
10 a.m.: A late rise and a li’l barista
I’m sleeping in if I can, which I can’t because I have a toddler, but let’s say I can sleep ’til 10. That would be insane.
Then I’m making coffee at home. I’m making it with my 4-year-old because he likes to make my coffee now. He always wanted to help, now he really wants to do it on his own. I’m still there to supervise, but he does do a lot of it.
I do batch brew. I’m doing Verve Coffee that I’m grinding there, and then I’m brewing four cups because I need my coffee. I had a Moccamaster for a long time, but I recently got a Simply Good Coffee. There’s no plastic — it’s all glass and metal.
11 a.m.: Chocolate croissants for everyone
We’re driving to Pasadena and we’re going to [Artisanal Goods by] CAR, which is the place to get the best chocolate croissant, I think, in the world. I don’t just think in L.A., I think they’re better than Paris. I’m going there with my wife and my kid and I’m having another coffee and some pastry. We’re ordering three [chocolate croissants]. We’re not doubling up.
11:45 a.m.: The family business
We’re driving to Fair Oaks in Pasadena. There’s a place called T.L. Gurley. We shot “Hacks” there, actually. Not only in Season 1, but also full circle in Season 5. We’re going to shmay around and look at antiques. My kid is going to want to play a vintage pinball machine. We’re going to find a little piece of art for the house or what have you. It’s not necessarily that I’m on the hunt. It’s to pass the time and to have some fun. If I could do anything and have a leisurely day and take my mind off work, that’s what I’m doing.
People love to interact with my kid when he’s there. We’re really training him to appraise things at a young age. My parents are part-time dealers of antiques. My grandmother bought and sold antiques. It’s kind of a family business.
1:30 pm.: Baguettes and books
We’re driving to Larchmont and we’re getting a sandwich at Larchmont Village Wine, Spirits & Cheese. I’m doing prosciutto-mozzarella-basil on a baguette.
Then we’re going to Chevalier’s Books. What’s sad is that I’m often not looking for leisure material. I’m looking for something that I’m interested in learning more about or writing about, or that they’re turning into a show I want to audition for. But we’re also doing Little Golden Books for my son. He’s obsessed. We’re not huge on screen time, so we really encourage the book-buying.
2:30 p.m.: Cast pool party
We’re having some family fun in the pool and we’re doing that until evening. We invite people over all the time. My sister-in-law is a New Yorker, but she actually wrote last season on “The Rooster” and she’s often writing on shows in L.A., so she’s often here and she’ll have a couple friends come over. I know this sounds like a piece of PR or something, but we’ll really literally have Hannah [Einbinder] and maybe Mark Indelicato from “Hacks” come over to swim. Jen, our co-creator of “Hacks,” will come over.
6:00 p.m.: Family dinner
Sometimes we’ll order Grá to the house, which is a pizza place in Echo Park — excellent sourdough crust pizza. But if we don’t do that, an ideal evening is an early dinner at All Time on Hillhurst in Los Feliz. We’re ordering the ceviche and my son is having all of it and not sharing with anybody at the table.
8:45 p.m.: A thrilling ending to the day
After putting my kid to bed, my wife and I, in an ideal world (full disclosure: we haven’t done this in two years), we’ll watch something together that we’ve been meaning to watch. We have a long list of movies and we either want to revisit or that we haven’t seen that we need to watch.
We don’t watch a lot of comedies. It’s a dream to watch a “Black Bag” or a little espionage thriller. We really like that because it’s so different than the stuff that we’re working on in the day.
Often the things we watch are things that we admire. We like deconstructing it as fans of film and television. We do like talking about the making of it, but it’s less of a critique and more of a listing of the things we appreciated about it.
10:30 p.m.: No work tomorrow
And then it’s lovemaking ’til morning on a perfect Sunday. If it’s a perfect Sunday, there’s also a Monday that’s off.
Jay (not pictured) found himself alone and hopeless in a jail cell when a fellow inmate’s unexpected words of comfort changed his life.
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When Jay was 22 years old, he was a self-described loner. In this story, he is being identified by his nickname to allow himself to speak candidly about the following experience and his mental health. He says the few people he did hang out with at the time had questionable morals.
”I chose my friends poorly, and your friends have a tendency to rub off on you. And so I started making poor decisions,” Jay said.
One evening, when he and his friends were out drinking, someone suggested they should try to break into the chemistry building on his college campus. Most of the group shrugged the suggestion off, deeming it impossible, but Jay was convinced he could pull it off.
“The next night I made a plan of how to do it, and I did it,” Jay remembered. “And I didn’t get caught doing it, [but] I got caught afterwards.”
At around 1 that morning, Jay was placed in the county detention center. Sitting alone in his cell, reality began to sink in.
“I pretty much thought that my life as I knew it was going to be over, and I had decided that the world would be better off without me in it.”
Jay made a plan to end his life. As he prepared himself, he began to cry.
“But just in that moment when I was ready to do it, I heard a voice coming from the top left corner of my cell, from a little vent. And someone called out to me and said, ‘Hey, is this your first time?’”
The man who called out was an inmate in the cell next door.
“I collected myself a little bit, and I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Can I pray for you?’”
Jay had grown up religious, but had stopped going to church years before. In that moment, though, he knew he needed support. He said yes, and listened as the man began to pray.
“I wish I could tell you that I remember the [exact] words that he said to me, but what I remember is that his words landed with me, and instead of wanting my life to be over, suddenly I saw hope,” Jay said.
The interaction happened nearly ten years ago, but it was a pivotal moment in Jay’s life, and one he thinks about all the time.
“[Now], I have a good job. I have a girlfriend who loves me. I have a life. But I have a life because somebody who was in the same situation I was in had the courage to talk to a fellow inmate and be kind.”
Jay says that he wishes he could meet that man again and express his appreciation.
“[I would] shake that guy’s hand, give him a hug, and tell him what his small gesture meant for me, how he changed the course of my life.”
My Unsung Hero is also a podcast — new episodes are released every Tuesday. To share the story of your unsung hero with the Hidden Brain team, record a voice memo on your phone and send it to myunsunghero@hiddenbrain.org.
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