#Infinity mirror series

Nestled into the landscape between fields of zinnia, periwinkle, and nasturtium flowers, she spotted an unusually shaped gourd the size of a man’s head. This work first appeared in the exhibition Floor Show, held at Castellane Gallery, in New York, in 1965.Ĭoming from a family that cultivated and sold plant seeds for a living, Kusama saw a pumpkin for the first time during a childhood visit to a seed-harvesting farm with her grandfather.

#Infinity mirror series

Furthermore, the mirrors created a participatory experience by casting the visitor as the subject of the work, a feature that the artist demonstrated through a provocative series of self-portraits in which she used her body to activate the space.

The reflective surfaces allowed her vision to transcend the physical limitations of her own productivity. Infinity Mirror Room- Phalli’ s Field was perhaps the most important breakthrough for Kusama during this immensely fruitful period. In response to the labor intensity of this work, she started to utilize mirrors to achieve similar repetition. She exhibited the works together in an attempt to create hallucinatory scenes of phallic surfaces but found the labor involved in making them physically and mentally taxing. Kusama spent much of her time between 19 sewing thousands of stuffed fabric tubers and grafting them to furniture and found objects to create her Accumulation sculptures. The rooms also provide an opportunity to examine the artist’s central themes, such as the celebration of life and its aftermath.īy tracing the development of these iconic installations alongside a selection of her other key artworks, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors aims to reveal the significance of the Infinity MIrror Rooms amidst today’s renewed interest in experiential practices and virtual spaces. 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. Over the course of her career, the artist has produced more than twenty distinct Infinity Mirror Rooms, and the Hirshhorn’s exhibition-the first to focus on this pioneering body of work-is presenting six of them, the most ever shown together. Using mirrors, she transformed the intense repetition of her earlier paintings and works on paper into a perceptual experience. Operates on 110 volts AC.Yayoi Kusama had a breakthrough in 1965 when she produced Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli’s Field. Seeing how the number of images formed increases as the angle decreases will give your students a solid understanding of how the Infinity Mirror produces it amazing effect. Then repeat the experiment at 72°, 60°, 45°, and 30° angles. Place a colored pin between them and challenge your students to count the number of virtual images that are formed. To demonstrate how the Infinity Mirror works, have your students arrange two plane mirrors at right angles to each other. Once you've grabbed their attention, you can move onto other critical thinking activities such as finding virtual images in plane mirrors, understanding the inner workings of a periscope, or learning how a car rear-view mirror's day/night feature works.

that's cool!' and 'How does it work?' comments will soon follow. It takes the normally mundane topic of the physics of plane mirrors- something that students have all seen, every morning before they come to school and presents it in a new and fascinating way. The Infinity Mirror features two parallel mirrors and a circle of small white bulbs that, together, produce what appears to be an endless number of lights that stretch to infinity. Spark your students' interest in light and optics with an exciting demonstration of the law of reflection.

Diffraction, Polarization & Interference.