Saturday, December 31, 2011

Yayoi Kusama's fantastic Obliteration Room 2011 at the Queensland Art Gallery

By Jack Brummet, Contemporary Arts Editor

I always enjoy these public, interactive art pieces.  Earlier this year, I was knocked out by the gigantic paint-by-number mural at Bumbershoot in Seattle.  But this. . .wow.


Installation view of The obliteration room 2011 as part of ‘Yayoi Kusama: Look Now, See Forever’, Gallery of Modern Art, 2011 / © Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. / Photographs by Mark Sherwood

Queensland Art Gallery has a long relationship with the artist Yayoi Kusama, and as part of her current exhibition there, she created an interactive children's project.  First, she created an all-white room, of "an Australian domestic environment."  Next, she created thousands of brightly colored adhesive dots.  And then, she turned the kids loose on the room.  This is just wonderful. 


Installation view of The obliteration room 2011 as part of 'Yayoi Kusama: Look Now, See Forever', Gallery of Modern Art, 2011 / © Yayoi Kusama, Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc. / Photograph: Mark Sherwood




"While this may suggest an everyday topography drained of all colour and specificity, it also functions as a blank canvas to be invigorated — or, in Kusama’s vocabulary, ‘obliterated’ — through the application, to every available surface, of brightly coloured stickers in the shape of dots."

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