Air-inflated awareness

While Israeli Doron Gazit attended college to learn industrial design, he also worked as a street vendor selling twisty balloons. Gazit’s success in business (he founded Air Dimensional Design Inc., or AirDD®, in Los Angeles, Calif., in 1989) and artistic life stem from his recognition that a long, slender balloon inflated with air becomes a line. The line can become a drawing, a structure or a movement. AirDD designs and manufactures luminous inflatable elements, windblown shapes and special lighting for events that range from bar mitzvahs to the Olympic Games. Gazit’s newest mission, however, is an artistic quest to draw an emphatic red inflatable line across natural resources being destroyed by drought and climate change.

Gazit kicked off the Red Line Project in April 2015 at the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts Off the Wall Gala. The Red Line, a 500-foot-long tube made of red flame-retardant, low-density polyethylene inflated with air, was threaded throughout the art center and the surrounding neighborhood to call out the interconnections. The Red Line, folded into a 60-pound package, next made its way to Israel and the Dead Sea, where drought is exposing sinkholes and polluting water. The Dead Sea Red Line snaked over a barren landscape pockmarked by acidic-looking sinkhole pools. The Red Line installation is temporary, lasting only four or five hours—enough time to get photographs or videotape captured via a drone overflight.

Gazit headed to the drought-dry San Joaquin Valley in September, before continuing to Iceland, Alaska and other lands, such as the Amazon River, affected by climate changes.