Balloon Artist Demonstrates Link between Inflation and Happiness

November 19, 2011
Thank you to every child who asked Willy Chyr for a pink poodle or a yellow giraffe. Those children, mesmerized by the squeaking rubber, helped Willy hone his craft, inflating balloons and twisting animals to life. Today, Willy’s transition from animals to art has made this childhood delight suitable — even enlightening — for all ages.

While earning a BA in Physics and Economics, Willy spent three years performing and eventually directing in Le Vorris & Vox Circus. Attending an architect’s lecture toward the end of college, though, he discovered a way to move beyond balloon animals at birthday parties, becoming inspired to use his skills “to explore the properties of light,” he explains. Today he is integrating his formal education into his work. By “studying fractal patterns and generative artwork,” he divulges, he uses math “to determine the shapes and structures” of his sculptures.

Willy’s early work, Balluminescence, inspired by bioluminescence, light emission from living organisms, featured a 1,000 balloon jellyfish. He followed that with a runway collection that flaunted buoyant balloon dresses. Numerous works later, the technical mastery evident in Willy’s recent Eye Candy sculpture, on display in Toronto’s gh3 architecture studio, suffuses the joys of youth with artistic ingenuity.

Willy’s work has garnered much attention, not least in ELLE magazine. “[The] biggest surprise is probably the response,” he admits, “and how [many] people are interested in having the balloons expand into different media.” This year, Willy was one of only eight artists selected for the Nuit Blanche Happiness Project, an Artist Bloc exhibit. Aaron Kopff, Artist Bloc co-founder and co-curator of the Project, recalls the moment he first saw Willy’s work: “I could only imagine the awe on a child’s face.”

The Project displays interactive installations inside a house, each one set to a piece from Charles Spearin’s latest album, also called The Happiness Project. Spearin, a member of the Canadian group Broken Social Scene, composed music that mirrors the melodies of his friends’ and family’s voices as they talk about happiness. Similarly, the Bloc’s Project provides “a unique expression of joy and an exercise in welcoming the community….”[1]

Appropriately, the music for Willy’s piece echoes a toddler mashing words at random. “Balloons are inherently silly and this is a celebration of that,” Willy explains. With two days to prepare and without even a sketch, Willy manages a unique expression of joy that is incontestably playful — an inflatable testament to youth. Taking in the sculpture, one drifts beneath three truck-tire-sized balloon globules — literally suspended in their animation — and finds the weightless spheres illuminated by audio-reactive 3D visuals, colours, and shapes Willy has programmed to react to the music. Cotton candy, marshmallows, rainbow popsicles, and other happy childhood delights, unbidden, bubble up to one’s consciousness. “Most liked it,” Willy says of viewers’ initial reactions. “It seemed to make them happy.”

Happiness is in high demand. Increasingly there are initiatives to identify the mental traits responsible for a sunny disposition, such as the Positive Psychology movement, and others to measure the quantity of the truly happy. The country of Bhutan, for example, has supplanted the GDP with the GNH (Gross National Happiness). For most of the 12 hours of Nuit Blanche, there was a line-up for the Happiness Project leading down the street — nearly 2,000 visitors that night. Aaron recalls “the smiles on people’s faces” as they interacted with the installations. Willy, reflecting on the night, admits, “I like to think that my pieces evoke feelings of delight and joy in audience members.” And he is right.