March 22 marks the 94th birthday of Japanese-American Painter, Sculptor, Photographer, Installation, Performance, and Conceptual Artist, Yayoi Kusama. As a child, Kusama was denied the freedom of making art as and experienced hallucinations in which a single pattern would engulf everything in her field of vision. These themes of self-obliteration and representation of the infinite would become an obsession for Kusama as she attempted to represent her alternate reality. Her use of dots in painting and drawing became the manifestation of this effort and has become the defining motif in her work. She extended this motif to her Infinity Rooms, installations in which viewers become immersed in Kusama's hallucinatory world through the use of mirrors and lights.
Yayoi Kusama. The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away. The Broad, Los Angeles, CA.
This room is put together with mirrors on the walls, and the floor is covered in a layer of water. There’s also a marked platform from which visitors are invited to admire the twinkling, multi-coloured strobe lights that hang from the ceiling at different lengths. As the lights are reflected back and forth from mirror to mirror, viewers witness a vision of seemingly infinite lights.