The exhibition "Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors" opened Thursday at Washington D.C.'s Hirshhorn Gallery. The show features 70 years of the iconic Japanese artist's work, including six of her buzzy "infinity rooms." The mirrored, enclosed spaces are meant to be experienced alone to give the viewer an impression of entering a boundless realm with surfaces reflecting one another back and forth, forever.
Every day, thousands of museum visitors are expected to wait in line to enter these profoundly trippy rooms for approximately one minute at a time. Often, patrons will commemorate this minute with a photograph. The photos will likely, then, be uploaded to various social networks. Each digital image, itself a snapshot of infinite reflected images, will join an endless stream of so many more. As the museum hashtag aptly calls it, #InfiniteKusama.
So even if you never see "Infinity Mirrors" in person, you'll surely see it spread across your various timelines and feeds. As images of the exhibition disperse wildly across the web, Kusama's work operates in a state of in-between, with one foot in the material museum space and another in the immaterial world of the internet.
When Kusama began creating art as a child in 1930s Japan, there was, of course, no such thing as the internet. And yet–through her paintings, sculptures and, most of all, "infinity room" installations–the artist seems to divine the future of a sprawling space where our immaterial selves can proliferate, congregate, mutate and network.