“Between Tides” renders the ability temporarily useless
Down in Rockaway Beach, New York, six table tennis The tables rise directly from the sand, though each one interferes with the game it seems ready to host. A tentacle blocks a clean serve, while circular holes swallow the ball. Between Tides, a Public Art Fund exhibition curated by Gabriela López Dena, begins with a form almost anyone can recognize and then removes the comfort of knowing exactly what to do with it.
Familiar dimensions remain visible in the orders of Moko Fukuyama, Ilana Harris-Babou, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Carlos H. Matos, Amalia Pica and SUPERFLEX. However, the technique travels poorly from one sculpture to another. By rendering expertise temporarily useless, the paintings turn competition into a collective exercise in experimentation.
image © designboom
Ilana Harris-Babou: for those of us who live on the coastline
Artist born in Brooklyn Ilana Harris-Babou makes this loss of capacity clear to those of us who live on the coastline. Everyday beach objects cast in ceramic sit on a shimmering terrazzo surface, blocking the direct paths that experienced players usually rely on. A smooth rally becomes difficult for everyone, which leaves room for hesitant serves and odd rebounds. Other uses of the table can arise beyond grades.
Close seating extends the work beyond the match, giving players and bystanders somewhere to pause between turns. Harris-Babu developed the installation through free-play ideas and drawings made by beachgoers during workshops along the Rockaway Boardwalk. The board creates a relaxed social zone where a person can compete, watch, rest or completely improvise another activity.
image © designboom
Moko Fukuyama: Old School
Japanese filmmaker and military artist Moko Fukuyama introduces a more theatrical break with Old School, which collides with a 1958 aluminum boat with a wooden ping pong table held by a painted sea creature. The salvaged boat came from Marina 59 in the Rockaways, and the tentacles were carved from reclaimed walnut and finished in high-gloss automotive paint. A thick end pushes through the playing surface to where a player might expect to send the ball.
By placing the obstacle directly in the path of play, Fukuyama gives the opportunity a physical form. A strong serve can hit the sculpture and change direction, while the overturned boat turns the whole game into a scene of sea confusion. Fukuyama draws from the folklore of the sea and her own relationship with fishing in the Rockaways, using the painting to suggest how quickly familiar systems can be disrupted by forces beyond anyone’s control.
image © designboom
The Iglesias Sisters: Tell Me
The sisters of the Church incorporates unpredictability into the sound of DiMeLo, a stainless steel table embedded with musical instruments. A glockenspiel spans part of the surface, while percussion pieces occupy the opposite side. The ball can hit a drum or glance at a cymbal, producing tones that depend on the tempo and direction of each rally.
The Queens-born sisters draw on childhood games and their habit of using ping pong to work on ideas together. Here, the competition gives way to a random composition made by two players or whoever decides to play the instruments directly. Each match sounds different and the ability to return the ball offers little control over the music produced.
image © designboom
Amalia Pica: Fair Play
The standard setting for two people is extended by Amalia Pica through Fair Play, a zig-zag formation of eight tabletop tables that can seat up to ten people. Colorful nautical symbols mark the title of the project on all surfaces, while fabric flags on the top give an immediate invitation: COME PLAY. The formation makes it difficult to spot an individual opponent or track a clear line of exchange.
Players must decide where a rally starts and who participates, and the length of each point can change as the crowd changes. Pica draws from the communal table tennis games of her childhood in Argentina, where teams circled a table and passed paddles from one person to another. In Rockaway, the sculpture turns a face-to-face duel into a shifting crowd game shaped by whoever enters.
image © designboom
Carlos H. Matos: Tlachco
Combining a modern table tennis surface with the sloping walls and hoops of an Ulama court, Carlos H. Matos unfolds another story of the ball game in Tlachco. The ancient Mesoamerican game used a rubber ball hit with the body, and its exact forms varied by place and time. The Mexican artist reduces his architecture to a tabletop scale, using aluminum and volcanic stone to create a solid pitch with multiple possible goals.
A player can use the sloped sidewalls as rebounds or aim through a hoop before the known score drops completely. The sculpture keeps the historical reference quite open to invention, allowing the game to be imagined through movement rather than reconstructed as a fixed lesson. Each rally becomes a small attempt to decipher how the field is intended to be used.
