James Charlton
TradeAir

TradeAir established a real time link between gallery visitors and the artist in his Auckland studio allowing for the collaborative inflation of rubber forms located in situ at Artspace. The work extended concepts surrounding recent projects by Charlton in which form is proposed as a time-based medium contingent upon viewer interaction.

These inflatable forms, constructed from recycled truck inner tubes that hold an approximate tidal volume of the human lung, were inflated when a gallery visitor blew into an exhalant device. Gradually, over the duration of the exhibition, the form of the work changed from being a slouched pile of rubber to a freestanding form. Viewers literally breathed shape into these forms and in doing so engaged with a visual arts practice in which the construction of form is born of the cumulative participatory dynamic between audience and artist.