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. 

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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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