The Happy Show...

One of the main reasons we went to Philadelphia was to go and see Stefan Sagmeister's Happy Show exhibition at the ICA...

More specifically we went to go and see where the sugar lumps I glued together had ended up!

The whole exhibition was absolutely brilliant, it was so fun and interactive and so interesting. 

The exhibition started on the main staircase of the gallery, using the steps to spell out messages...

Going up the steps read 'don't expect'...

Going down the steps read 'people to change'.

At the top of the steps was a large window out a patio area, where two huge white inflatable monkeys sat holding messages saying 'Everybody thinks they are right'...

All around the gallery Sagmeister had hand written notes on the walls relating to all the different pieces of work - telling the stories behind each piece, or explaining some fact that inspired the work. 

He'd also done some funny little writing around things like light switches and burglar alarms...

Then, just as you went into the main exhibition hall there was a ticket machine on the wall...

You pressed the button and out popped a ticket with a custom instruction written on it. We pressed it 3 times, each time with a different instruction...

Every part of the gallery space had been thought about and used carefully, even the lift doors were used to communicate a form of happiness...

The exhibition was full of lots of different pieces that had been down over a number of years - lots of it we'd seen before in books in in his talks but there were a few brand new pieces especially for the show. One of them was an interactive piece - a white bicycle in the middle of the room...

Which was rigged up to a generator or dynamo or something that powered layers of big neon lights on the wall of the gallery...

As you pedaled the lights came on, and the longer you pedaled the more of the phrase was revealed, until after a few minutes of pedaling this appeared...

In the corner of the main room were some rather well stuck together sugar cubes that formed big 3D letters...

 I think mine were on the T...

There was a little camera near the letters that was supposed to capture your face and see whether you were smiling or frowning... the lights would them shine brightly if you were smiling, and be dim if you were frowning, but unfortunately the projector wasn't working... so we missed the main attraction (we might have to pop back before the exhibition closes in August and see if it works then).

Towards the end of the exhibition there was a HUGE wall covered in lots of different infographics with facts and figures about happiness around the world. At the end of the wall were 10 very long bubblegum machines number 1-10 with the question 'how happy are you?' underneath...

You were supposed to take a quarter, put it into the machine that represented how happy you were on the scale, and take a bubble gum ball...

The bubble gum machines then acted as a huge interactive bar chart, going down over time, revealing how happy the visitors of the exhibition were...

We were both pretty high on the chart - well, we were until we put in a quarter (one of our own because the pot was empty), turned the handles and then nothing came out! So then we put some money in number 2 - after being full of disappointment - and it worked!

It was a fantastic exhibition, and WELL worth the trip to Philadelphia. It was great to see the sugar lumps, even if the projector wasn't working and it was great to see some clips of the Happy Film that Sagmeister's releasing next year.

I would love to go back and see the exhibition again before it finished in August, it'd be good to see the sugar lumps in action and to see how the bumble gum bar chart ended up!