[lately] a spot of colour:

The obliteration room is part of Yayoi Kusama's Look Now, See Forever exhibit at GoMA. It began with the installation of a white living space, consisting of dining and lounge areas, and furnished with the necessities and commodities of everyday life -- chairs, tables, bookshelves, a cd player, potted plants, and a piano.

The obliteration room 2011 revisits the popular interactive children’s project developed by Yayoi Kusama for the Queensland Art Gallery's ‘APT 2002: Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’. In this reworked and enlarged installation, an Australian domestic environment is recreated in the gallery space, complete with locally sourced furniture and ornamentation, all of which has been painted completely white. While this may suggest an everyday topography drained of all colour and specificity, it also functions as a blank canvas to be invigorated — or, in Kusama’s vocabulary, ‘obliterated’ — through the application, to every available surface, of brightly coloured stickers in the shape of dots. [source]

Visitors to the obliteration room are handed a sheet of sticky circles and invited to stick them somewhere -- anywhere -- in the room. The result is a constantly-changing installation which slowly builds from a blank and somewhat empty environment into one which is crazy and full of character, developed not by one artist but by thousands. Everyone gets to take part!

In my ideal world, all public art installations would be like this -- interactive, joyful, and relatable to everyone, from children to adults. Of course, that's incredibly limiting, since one of the primary values of artistic expression is its power to be individual. Art need not be significant to everyone in order to be art. But that only makes it more cool to stumble into works like this, ones which are so accessible and so much fun.

You can see the obliteration room at GoMA until the 11th of March.

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Conversations:

Carla -- thanks for loving me in spite of my randomness! And I will love you even though you called them "rock poos" instead of "rock pools" :D.

Mothercare -- it was really a lovely day. So many amazing things to look at, and the best people to look at them with :).

Un -- hee!

Lauren -- the fawn was my favourite part! And yes, I still want to jump into the pictures!