Yayoi Kusama

I was in Sydney last week and went to the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I entered a surreal world filled with organic shapes and lots of polka dots. Yayoi makes large paintings, soft sculptures and environmental sculptures. As a child, she suffered from hallucinations and began seeing dots – lots of dots. They have become a lifelong obsession.

Art makes me think in different ways; it gives me the ability to view the world through someone else’s gaze. I assume this is the case for most people. What I got from Yayoi’s vision was a sense of boundlessness – freedom from space, time, gender, location & ‘normality’.

Entering her Infinity Room initially takes your breath away. You walk through a door into a room. You know you are in a tiny room, but you feel suspended in a space that has no walls, floor or ceiling. Through lights and mirrors, I could instantly suspend believe and simply float in infinity. You become a small part of this silent, colourful, magical, timeless cosmos.

It’s an exhibition I wanted to immediately revisit and explore in greater depth. I returned to Melbourne without doing so. Hopefully I’ll get back to Sydney before the exhibition closes in June.

Yayoi Kusama Dots Obsession

Rosalie Gascoigne – vitality: the source of life

Rosalie Gascoigne Sweet lovers 1990 Collection of Christopher Hodges and Helen Eager, Sydney © Rosalie Gascoigne Estate, administered by VISCOPY, Australia

I’ve been a fan of the contemporary visual artist Rosalie Gascoigne for many years and was keen to see the current exhibition of her work at The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, located at Federation Square, Melbourne.

Rosalie’s creative inspiration came from her immediate surrounds where she lived: the sparse ‘Monaro country’ bordering Canberra. She was a scavenger, who collected odd, weathered bits of galvanised iron, wood, enamelware, linoleum, feathers and cupie dolls and turned them into whimsical, experimental works of art, which evoke a unique sense of Australian landscape.

I like the way Rosalie breathes life into discarded material to create something anew. Her feathered fences, faded lino ’stepping stones’ and artworks created out of yellow and orange road signs are compelling. The associative memories that her work triggers in the viewer offers endless possibilities in framing ideas about landscape, memory and history.

I was interested in the connections between her oeuvre and my research into home movies. In particular, her preference to work with style and form over colour. The power in her work is often due to the repetitiveness within the artwork.

I think home movies are just the starting point to examine a whole range of possibilities – social history, history of cinema, Australian identity, materiality, etc. The exhibition also made me reflect on the connection between landscape and identity and how that influences filmmakers.

I’m back in research mode and ready to tackle my Honours project.

Hooray!

Go see the exhibition. It closes March 15.