Private Helicopter

First exhibited in “Dreaming Reality”, Pyramid Gallery, Haifa, Israel. Curated by Shirly Meshulam.

At the age of ten, I found an abandoned washing machine on the side of the street. For reasons I couldn’t explain at the time, I immediately saw a helicopter. I believed—wholeheartedly—that I could build one, powered by its motor and my Commodore 64. That belief wasn’t metaphorical; it felt entirely real. I even began recruiting a crew.

That impulse—naïve, absurd, yet utterly sincere—never really left me.

Twenty years later, I returned to that vision. Helicopter is not an actual flying machine, but a sculpture drawn from the space between imagination and failure, memory and matter. It is built from remnants, but it aspires toward flight. At its core lies a child’s refusal to distinguish between dream and reality.

The work explores the persistence of creative delusion, the strange mechanics of hope, and the power of fantasy as an engine for making. It is not an homage to childhood—it is childhood, suspended in the air just long enough to be seen.

The first iteration of the piece was exhibited in Dreaming Reality (2010), Pyramid Gallery, Haifa, Israel, curated by Shirly Meshulam. It was not a functioning aircraft, but rather a sculpture of imagination, invention, and persistence—a tribute to the absurdity and beauty of dreams that refuse to fade.

• computer and electronics curtesy of Madatech museum