Life as a Fish.

Sam Borkson and Tury Sandoval are probably best known for their successful line of plush art toys produced under the name ‘FriendsWithYou’. Toys, however, are only one part of their project; they would like you to know that FriendsWithYou has goals much loftier than commercial success. At the beginning of their Walker Art Center talk¹, the duo emerged from the crowd and proceeded to encourage the audience to “look around” and hug their neighbors (Sandoval: “They probably want to hug you back!”). The two artists present themselves not simply as object and image-makers, but as spiritualists, populists, and altruistic propagators of “luck, togetherness, and magic.”

Sandoval and Borkson started working as FriendsWithYou in 2002, when they first created Malfi: a pear shaped, frowning character with X’s for eyes that manages to be incredibly huggable despite its grim expression. Since then, they have demonstrated a gift for making the sort of cute-but-not-too-cute creations adored by the art toy market—often inhabiting an aesthetic space somewhere in-between Pokèmon and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. However, their real talent seems to lie in the ability to leverage these creations as merchandise, and to eventually acquire corporate sponsorship and advertising work (a list of their clients/benefactors includes Target, MTV, Nike and Toyota). When they are not designing toys or advertising campaigns, FriendsWithYou continues to investigate their aesthetic sensibility in an art context. This is where their mission of positive spiritual influence gets the most emphasis: in their extremely ambitions (and Toyota Scion sponsored) blimp parade, Skywalkers, as a procession of “universal entities” that have been invited to earth to bring “luck and energy and magic and art to all the people”[2]. They seem to cast similarly noble intentions on their other art experiments, including Wish Come True, the exhibition they presented this September at the SOO Visual Arts Center.

Wish Come True initially had the look of any other exhibition opening, at least until you approached the two inflatable spheres to the back of the space (smiling and frowning versions of Malfi’s head). Only then did you notice a small door in the wall of the gallery, and through this rabbit hole was the main feature of Wish Come True: an otherworldly space filled with inflatable FriendsWithYou characters. With the walls painted bright green and yellow, and the space inhabited by giant, rainbow-striped creatures with smiling faces, the Miami duo certainly achieved a dreamlike quality in their installation—but the type of dream conjured was questionable. Though this event was explicitly billed as “kid-friendly”, there was only one child participating in the installation space when I got there, and in the main gallery there was an unlucky boy with an icepack on his head. While a small group of active participants jostled about in the center of the room, the majority of the crowd hugged the walls, tensing in anticipation for the large inflatable Buddy Chub or Fluffy Pop that would soon be on a collision course toward their heads. One group attempted on several occasions to use the cylindrical Mr. TTT as a battering ram and send the inflated creature through the door into the main gallery. It’s true there was a sense of childish playfulness in the room, but it was more the type that generally comes with the warning “it’s only fun until someone gets hurt.” While the installation was in many ways formally successful, the emphasis was clearly on the experience—which felt more like an uncomfortable social experiment than a “Wish Come True.”

Perhaps if I hadn’t seen Sandoval and Borkson speak at the Walker I might have accepted Wish Come True as a successfully engaging (although slightly discomforting) interactive experience. Unfortunately, there is a definite tension between how they speak of their work and how it exists in reality. They push the idea of their creations somehow spreading good vibes and—even more vaguely—a positive spiritual message. In actuality, it’s unclear how their work operates on a higher moral or spiritual ground than similar creative projects accepted simply as toys or cartoon characters. They have seen success both commercially and in the art world, and this is a notable achievement. However, if Wish Come True is any indication of how FriendsWithYou plans to spread “luck, togetherness, and magic” throughout the world, they may want to rethink their strategy.

This article was originally printed in Vol. 1, Issue #2 of ARP! , in beautiful hand-written cursive script.

More images from this exhibition can be found here .

¹ You can view documentation of FriendsWithYou’s talk in The Walker Channel archives on the Walker Art Center’s website .

² From FriendsWithYou’s documentary about the Skywalkers event, which can be found on their website or viewed in the documentation of their talk at the Walker .