Let’s be honest, some of us are still recovering from New Year’s Eve and Christmas. The time has come to get rid of decorations and clean up the mess from the New Year’s party. Things may look a little like a disaster. Not all messes look terrible or come with after party shame, though. Creating a controlled mess is artist Yayoi Kusama. It began as a perfectly white room, housing perfectly white furniture, until she handed a museum’s smallest visitors an unlimited supply of stickers.

 

 

 

Kusama is known for her colorful and vibrant work, and her dedication to using as much variety as possible. Kusama has practiced, film-making, public performance, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, fashion, poetry, fiction and public spectacle. Her exhibition, ‘Look Now, See Forever’, which is currently being featured at the Queensland Art Gallery, has one installation that required audience participation to make. ‘Obliteration’ took the minds of many children and thousands upon thousands of colorful stickers. Quickly, they each decorated parts of the room with their stickers, creating patterns and shapes. The room evolved over a two week period of time, slowly becoming much more than a colorful mess.

The room, which will be on display until March 12th, looks really cool. Ceiling to floor is covered in a flurry of rainbow stickers. Over the course of the two weeks children were allowed to decorate, the room evolved, and different patterns emerged and blossomed before the stickers covered most of its surface. This suits the artist well, as Yayoi Kusama is known for her contemplative use of pattern. Seeing the patterns children develop, separately and together, is wonderful. Readers in the South Brisbane area can see this installation and Kusama’s entire gallery into mid-March, but for those of us across the sea we’ve collected a few photos of the installation and its process via Colossal below!