Introduction
LOVE IS CALLING by Yayoi Kusama is an installation piece from 2013. It is made of Wood, metal, glass mirrors, tile, acrylic panel, rubber, blowers, lighting element, speakers, and sound. It measures roughly fourteen and a half feet by twenty-eight feet by twenty feet.
The room features a series of abstract shapes surrounded by mirrors.
Upon entering the room, the viewer is met with what appears to be an endless expanse of tentacle-like objects that are made of inflated rubber. These translucent tentacles are covered in black polka-dots and are illuminated from within by lights that change color: pink, yellow, green, blue and purple. The tentacles are both fixed to the ground and hanging from the ceiling. Through the speakers the sound of the artist’s voice is heard reciting a poem in Japanese on a continuous loop.
Yayoi Kusama
In 1965, Yayoi Kusama produced her first of what would become twenty infinity rooms. That piece, entitled Infinity Mirror Room (Phalli’s Field), was made of a room of mirrors with small and white phallic shapes covered in red polka dots. The infinity rooms that followed have all been different, however this room, LOVE IS CALLING, seems to share with its older sibling the subject matter of objects that appear like abstracted and dismembered phalluses.
When Kusama was a child, her mother made her spy on her father who repeatedly had affairs with other women. The experience left her traumatized and fearful of sex for many years. To take away the power of a phallus by abstracting it, disconnecting it from a body, and beautifying it with color and polka dots, Kusama is able to create a cathartic experience that transforms trauma into a space of self-reflection and our place within the infinity of existence. While LOVE IS CALLING is more indirect and abstract than Infinity Mirror Room (Phalli’s Field), it expands upon the theme by being a larger and inherently more ambitious piece while also adding an additional element of hope for universal love and healing in the form of the poem that is heard inside the room.
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