Assignment A4 - Grid Art

For the grid art project I decided to create something inspired by Yayoi Kusama’s Love Is Calling exhibit that we had the pleasure of viewing in the Tampa Museum of Art. At first I had no idea what I was going to create for this project, but after going into the exhibit twice and fully getting the chance to immerse completely in the art I came up with a simple but meaningful idea. I choose to simply create a yin yang symbol using colorful pellets that could be ironed together. In the poem that Kusama reads in her exhibit titled, Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears, Kusama talks about life and death, love and loneliness, and I believe the yin yang symbol simply but distinctly get across Kusama’s overall theme. A yin yang symbol symbolizes two contrasting things or ideas but how the two things always seem to meet or mash together in some sense. While in the exhibit I noticed that if I stood in one place and looked all around but down I would always see an infinite number of all the
people in the room including myself but as soon as I looked down it looked as though I was looking into an infinite abyss where I saw no one and not really even myself. For me this experience in her exhibit makes me consider the idea of what is life without death. If there was no such thing as death, life itself would have no true meaning because everyone would live forever. I feel as though society forces the idea that life is supposed to be this glorious thing that everyone should love and be grateful for but death is also a part of life and death is sad and unfortunate but you can’t really have one without the other.