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Galleries and museums all over the world are finding ways to connect people with art while we all spend more time at home. The Broad, a contemporary art museum based in LA, has taken heed and brought its most popular work, an installation by Yayoi Kusama, to the digital realm.
Kusama’s “infinity rooms” are quite possibly what the Japan-born artist is most famous for, as well as her recurring polka dot motifs. The piece featuring in the newly digitised experience, titled ‘The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away’, immerses the viewer in a limitless shadowy expanse dotted with orbs of light.
An artwork that creates a sprawling landscape out of a tiny room could be just the fix you need when cramped up at home.
The room is streaming via the Broad’s Instagram and YouTube channels as part of the museum’s Infinite Drone series, which showcases the piece with drone footage and a curated music selection specially chosen to enhance the spiritual aspects of Kusama’s exploration of eternity.
Kusama came to prominence in the New York art scene in the 1960s alongside greats like Andy Warhol (she is quoted as saying that Warhol copied her ideas of repetition and accumulation), where she staged provocative public happenings.
Kusama has long used art as a method to express and process her mental health issues, and she still lives and works today from Seiwa Mental Hospital. Her works, which balance contradicting feelings of claustrophobia and limitlessness, find new meaning in these uncertain times.