Yayoi Kusama - Infinities Room, Filled with the Brilliance of Life, 2011

 

Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room, is a mirror-lined chamber housing a dazzling and seemingly infinite LED light display.

 

Using mirrors, she transforms the intense repetition of her earlier paintings and works on paper into a perceptual experience. Ranging from peep-show-like chambers to multimedia installations, each of Kusama’s kaleidoscopic environments offers the chance to step into an illusion of infinite space. The rooms also provide an opportunity to examine the artist’s central themes, such as the celebration of life and its aftermath.

 

The pinpricks of light in the otherwise darkened room appear to reflect endlessly in the mirrors, giving the viewer the experience of being in an apparently endless space, broken only by points of light in the darkness. Much like in Jean Coctaeu's ORPHEE, the mirror is a symbol, a portal. Although in Orphee it was a portal into another world, this one it is was a way to replicate the world into an infinite world. So by entering the room, you are now in this infinite space.

 

Changing coloured light bulbs mirrored into endless space is undeniably magical, though Kusama’s manic sense that her work does “battle at the border of life and death” remains just out of reach.