N.Y. artist uses subway grates to inflate plastic bag creations

NEW YORK - An art student whose whimsical plastic animals inflate over sidewalk subway grates is drawing more attention to the lowly air vents than they've seen since Marilyn Monroe's skirt flew skyward in "The Seven Year Itch."

The animals, made of garbage or shopping bags, lie crumpled up over the grates until an updraft from a passing underground train fills them with air.

"When I saw a piece of construction tape flying off this grate one day I got interested in what that wind could do," said the artist, Joshua Allen Harris, who is studying fine art at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.

Harris, 31, spent weeks developing his first animal, a polar bear made of white plastic bags. The bear became an Internet hit once an arts group posted a video of it inflating.

Yesterday Harris brought his second creation, a 6-foot giraffe, to his usual installation spot near the art school in the Chelsea neighborhood.

He taped the giraffe's feet to the metal grates and waited.

At rest, the animal looked like the gray trash bags it was made of. But it rose on wobbly legs as a train passed under the air vent, resembling a real giraffe foal taking its first steps.

The animal's head bobbed in the breeze. Then the train left, and the giraffe was a heap of plastic once more.

"The animation part is out of my control," Harris said. "I set this thing up, and then the subway completes it."

Subway grates are a regular feature of the city landscape made famous by Monroe's billowing white dress in the 1955 film "The Seven Year Itch," directed by Billy Wilder.

Mairo Notton, an interior design student who stopped to watch the giraffe inflate, said most people don't like the sidewalk grates because they worry about dropping something into them.

"To use it like this makes it positive," he said. "It changes the street picture." *