Infinity Mirrors

As I briefly mentioned, last Friday my son and I went to see Infinity Mirrors at the AGO.  I had to rush home, change clothes, grab a bite to eat, and head back out with him.  There are some places that I think he could meet me on the TTC, but Spadina and Dundas isn't one of them.  As it turned out, getting to the AGO was a total drag on the TTC.  The bus was late, and then when it did turn up, the bus flew by the stop without even slowing down!  The next one took about 10 minutes to turn up and it was packed full as well, but the driver had to let a couple of people off, and we squeezed on in back.  Then there were signal problems with the subway.  I had budgeted a fair bit of extra time but we ended up turning up only about 3 minutes before our time slot.  So unhappy about the state of the TTC.  (Actually yesterday morning I was late for a meeting, since the 506, which normally takes 35 minutes to get to Bay, took 55+ minutes.  I was so frustrated.)

Anyway, the thing about the Infinity Mirrors exhibit is that there are lots and lots of lines.  I estimated it was about 2 hours of queuing for 3 minutes inside the Infinity Rooms.  There is one useful trick, however, which is that there is a main line and then a single's line if you are willing to go into the room with a random pair of strangers.  For two of the rooms, my son and I split up and went in the single's line, which did shave about 25 minutes off of the wait time.  I would definitely recommend this if you do have tickets for the event.  BTW, I decided that once through was enough, so I released a second ticket I had for next Wed., so there will be one more slot available Wed. evening if you are thinking of going down.

There are certainly several things to look at in addition to the Infinity Rooms -- stuffed phalli and quite a number of dot paintings.  Nonetheless, the big draw is going into the Infinity Rooms, and most of my pictures and video will focus on them.

 

The second room was more oriented towards light, and the staff warned us that the light levels would vary, and it was entirely possible that the room would be completely dark when we entered!  The lights were mostly on during my visit, but as I attempted to take a selfie at the very end, the room went completely black...

A sneak peek

I felt her most successful non-dot paintings were the gouaches and watercolours right before the pink ball room.

Kusama, The World of Insect, 1953

Kusama,Pacific Ocean, 1959

The exhibition then opened up into a room full of pink balls.

One of the more interesting things about the pink ball room was a ball that you could look into with a small infinity mirror inside.  If you looked at it properly, your eye would appear at the very far end (in that black hole area).

Then there was one last Infinity Room on the 5th floor where you would look at another person's face, reflected many, many times. (I have to admit, this one reminded me of a Lite-Brite set.)

There were some free-standing tentacles on view.

Even the stairs down to the fourth floor were involved in the exhibition, with big red dots changing the landscape.
 

I have to admit by this point, I was getting a bit tired.  Sometimes too much of a good thing is too much.  Nonetheless, this silver phalli installation (Ennui) was interesting.  If you got very close, you could see part of it was made from silver shoes!

There was another light-based Infinity Room after this.  Fortunately, the line moved considerably quicker by this point, as we were weary.

In line for the last timed room, there was some interesting wallpaper.

We weren't allowed to take photos or video in the pumpkin room (and only 2 people at a time could come through).  I'm not sure why, unless it was that they were worried people would get too close to the pumpkins and damage them.  This is basically what it looked like.

Finally, we came to the end.  There was a room where the visitors would add dots to furniture and the walls.  You weren't supposed to keep any keepsake dots, though I noted a few people snuck them out.  I wasn't that interested in the dots themselves, but the installation was interesting, in an overwhelming sort of way.

And that was that.  An interesting experience, but not one I'd want to repeat.