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Review | Yayoi Kusama: ‘Look Now, See Forever’
Yayoi Kusama
Dots Obsession 2011
Vinyl balloons, dot sheets, paint, mirrors
Image: Exhibition catalogue
Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist whose paintings, sculptures, performances and installations have influenced generations of artists from minimalists in New York to contemporary practitioners the world over. Kusama was born in 1929, in Japan where she studied for one year before moving to New York in 1957/58 (reports differ). At the time New York was living in the shadow of Abstract Expressionism, a movement which had thrust the city to the centre of the art world. Kusama’s influence was to be profound as she defied definition, experimented and captivated everyone with her eccentric persona. In 1973 Kusama returned to Japan and her profiled waned in the US until retrospectives of her work brought her international attention, particularly the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993. During the exhibition she began selling the silver spheres which made up her installation Narcissus Garden for the equivalent of $2. Reuben Keehan, Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art suggests this was clearly a critique of the institutionalisation of contemporary art. This is just one example where her work defies the expectation of genre, audience and authority.
Kusama has been continually influenced by the hallucinations she had as a child in which she was surrounded by colourful dots, flowers and patterns. Kusama’s mental illness is not extensively written of, nor does it need to be. She has an obsessive compulsive disorder. In Japan she chose to live at the Seiwa Hospital in Tokyo. She continues to live there, painting everyday. Her art and her life are inseparable.
An exhibition of Kusama’s recent installation, and well as video and sculpture is on display at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art. Her exhibition ‘Look Now, See Forever’ features samples from her diverse output, but is perhaps less indicative of her defiance of genre and authority than earlier exhibitions. This exhibition, however, is highly engaging and sure to excite return visits.
Emily Floyd, Steiner Rainbow 2006
In this video for the Gallery of Modern Art’s 5th birthday celebrations, Peter McKay, Curator of Contemporary Australian art, speaks about the changing significance of rainbows. Emily Flod’s sculpture draws inspiration from the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, taking the small wooden sculptures used in Steiner/Waldorf schools and enlarging them. The scale is a little bigger than human, as you can see in the video.
As a Steiner graduate I immediately recognised this sculpture. At school there were many small wooden objects which we all played with, the rainbow was one. This sculpture draws our attention to colour and scale, as well as the relevance of rainbows (which McKay speaks about). Steiner Rainbow is large and imposing, but it also draws you in, irresistibly you have to walk around it. There are many ways this artwork could be displayed, just as when we were kids changing the angles of each colour arc. It’s temping to touch too and while I was in the gallery small children were encouraged not to touch the artwork, though you could tell they really wanted to. (This seems at odds with the intended use for small wooden rainbows but perhaps not contemporary art objects.)
An interview with Emily Floyd is available in the Hiede Museum’s Colour Bazaar: Nine Contemporary Works education resource here. Colour Bazaar was on display 12 February to 19 June 2011.
Review | Ranjani Shettar’s Sunshine and Dew drops
The first thing you might note as you walk through this exhibition by Indian artist Ranjani Shettar is the importance of shadows. The walls and floors become a canvas while Shettar’s sculptures hang and cling to the walls and ceiling. Also notable is the hand crafted nature of these objects – their surfaces are shiny, textured, as well as creepily latexy. There are a range of materials and processes which have been used by the artist to capture aspects of the natural world, for example the effect of wind on leaves or the green belly of a firefly.
Artisans were employed by the artist for Touch Me Not (2006-07) which consists of what look like knitting needles inserted at varying lengths into the gallery wall, they are actually lacquered wooden balls on stainless steel. The varying angles and lengths of these rods when assembled en mass capture the movement of wind over a field of buds, or leaves. The wall plaque describes this neatly as ‘plant kinetics’. I admire the way repetition transforms something simple, identical and not at all ‘nature-like’ into an evocative windswept scene.
A neighbouring work, Fire in the Belly (2007), continues Shettar’s use of wood, this time specifically Acacia, lacquered in green. The wall informs me that these shapes reflect the bellies of fireflies which are in fact green. Each shape is differs slightly in their liquid-like exteriors. Though shiny and slick the wood is untreated underneath so will shrink and crack over time and the paint will peel, revealing the natural object underneath. It’s not clear how this process relates to the bulgy bellies of fireflies, but it may not relate. There may be two stories here, or more. The shadows from this artwork form interesting, overlapping shapes on the wall and floor, and though they are still there’s a sense of movement from their curves. The shadows in Shettar’s work add depth and expand the scale of each work to include the wall and floor space.
