That SoHo ballpit for adults may have come and (almost) gone, totally selling out its entire run, but that doesn't mean the Year of the Adult Ball Pit is over, oh no no no no, not by a long shot. In fact, did you hear what just opened at Shin Gallery on the Lower East Side? A BALL PIT FOR ADULTS.
Shin is a legitimate art gallery with numerous creative ideas on how to present the work they're trying to sell. So when a private collector hired them to unload conceptual artist John Baldessari's 1988 diptych A Fix'd Inflexible Sorrow, they had to come up with something to draw attention to what is essentially a single-piece-of-art "exhibition."
Enter: Ball Pit.
The Shin Gallery explains further:
"Come, Sweet Death [is] an immersive exhibition that inhabits John Baldessari’s monumental “A Fix’d Inflexible Sorrow” by translating elements of his work through the existential lens of Jean-Paul Sartre. The title of the show borrows its name from the ending credit music of the immensely popular anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, which encapsulates the show’s integrated, philosophical themes and underlying pursuit for a larger, unintelligible truth."
Uh yeah whatever guys BALL PIT!!!
According to ArtFCity, on the show's opening night the ball pit turned into something of a pick-up spot, but by yesterday afternoon it was filled with teenage boys engaged in an after-school free-for-all, hucking balls at each other with gleeful abandon. The ball pit is likely given over to more adult activities during the school day, or on weekends.
There's also a noose strung up over a pipe up near the gallery's ceiling, but don't get all sad and morbid on us because BALL PIIIIIIIT.
Come, Sweet Death will be at the Shin Gallery through November 1. Shin is located at 322 Grand Street, just east of Orchard, and is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. (212-375-1735; shin-gallery.com)
