via Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Anyone who loves gorgeous art installations, liminal spaces, or traveling mysteries is going to want to get a ticket to Yayoi Kusama’s traveling art installation Infinity Mirrors. The 89-year-old Japanese artist has created a stunning display of lights and sculptures which, when aided by full-length mirrors, split infinitely into repetitions that stretch on forever, surrounding the viewer. Her 2016 Infinity Mirror piece centered on her favorite October gourd, and was titled “All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins.” Endearingly relatable!
via Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Yayoi Kusama has been creating fantastic, colorful art for more than 60 years. She worked in New York amongst other artists from 1958 to 1973, and then returned to Japan. She still works out of her studio in Tokyo today. Since 1977, she has lived in a mental hospital by choice due to her nervous disorders and hallucinations, which she has struggled with since childhood. In the past few years, her work has been “rediscovered” and gained popularity thanks in part to social media. Her work with mirrors have been called “infinite dreamworlds,” and it helps that there is a current craze surrounding “participatory art” — artworks in which the viewer enters physically into the art piece itself.
One facet of this is the fact that mirrors encourage selfies, and there is hardly a more like-worthy backdrop than thousands of infinitely-stretching lights surrounding the selfie-taker. The Infinity Mirrors exhibit has been Instagrammed by a large swath of its visitors, commonly in the form of the ultimate mirror selfie. As Sarah Boxer writes in The Atlantic, “What has become almost laughably clear is that Kusama’s mirrored investigations into existentialism and infinity have become theaters of infinite narcissism.” She’s not wrong, but don’t feel bad if your immediate reaction to this art was to take a selfie with it. Boxer goes on to point out that narcissism is inherent to participatory art, and that such actions of participation “[call] attention to the power of the audience to complete, or complicate, or confound an artist’s intention.” Art belongs to you, viewers! I mean, not literally. Please do not steal or accidentally destroy any of the pumpkins or other objects while trying to take a selfie.
via Atlanta Journal-Constitution
However, acquiring a ticket won’t be easy. Tickets for High Museum members only were available from August 27-31st, and the online queues quickly filled up: by 10 A.M. on the first day, there were 8,550 people in line on the website. Tickets will go on sale to the general public on September 17th, and as you can imagine, the virtual lines will be even longer this time.
Those who are lucky enough to snag a ticket should plan to spend about two hours at the exhibit, which runs from November 18th, 2018, to February 17th, 2019. Only two or three people will be allowed in the infinity rooms at a time — some are actually so small they can only fit such a number of people, though of course, they appear much larger — and visitors are only permitted 30 seconds in each room. There are six rooms in total.
If you can’t wait to see this remarkable art display in our very own city of Atlanta, join the queue, and good luck.