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Art Gallery of New South Wales and Art & Australia Prize for Student Critical Writing

This critical writing prize is an initiative developed to support and encourage excellence in student critical writing on the visual arts. The prize offers an opportunity for students to develop their critical writing skills and gain recognition for their efforts. The competition is open to senior secondary students in NSW.

Congratulations to Ryan Abramowitz of Year 12, Masada College, Sydney, for his winning entry below.

The other winning entries were:

2. Rodanthe-Marie Butler, Year 11, Loreto Kirribilli
3. Isobel O'Brien, Year 11, Loreto Kirribilli

Highly commended: Clio Doughty, Year 11, Loreto Kirribilli

The full texts are available here.

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Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years

Spanning from February to June 2009, Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art showcased 'Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years' a magical and immersive experience. The exhibition is a retrospective of Kusama's multidisciplinary oeuvre of sculpture, installation, painting and performance 'happenings', driven by her acclaimed hallucinations, unvarying narcissism and indefatigable creativity. The diversity of her sensual collection is unified by a coherence of themes including repetition and accumulation, abstraction and representation, infinity and self-obliteration, which are infused with autobiographical, sexual and psychological content, expressed through an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of polka dots. Propelled by agitated energy, emotions and erupting expressions, 'Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years' is the vehicle through which the audience becomes consumed in distorting, displacing and disorientating delirium.
 
Imagine yourself duplicated infinitely, warped and enveloped in a cosmic universe of endless space. Through immersing oneself in the sculptural installation Fireflies on the water, 2000, one enters into a celestial, hypnotic realm of Kusama's imagination, where the only limits are the borders of the mirrored walls that insulate this matrix of light and infinity. Here we become transfixed by the meditative and kaleidoscopic atmosphere of sensorial nirvana and euphoria. Time is suspended among LED multicoloured lights which float like flies over a darkened water basin. A short pier invites visitors to enter this cocoon of tessellation, where we ourselves become the subject matter, our reflections fragmented and obliterated in a patterned vista. The audience capitulates into a dizzying and hallucinatory environment where identity becomes dismantled, displaced and dislodged from reality. We surrender to the contamination of Kusama's narcissism and notions of security are dissolved in an uncalculated cabin of illusions and repetitions. Ironically, the duplications and reflections of the self manifest in a sense of dilution and alienation from the internal as through succumbing to vanity we inherently become disconnected from identity. Ultimately the audience vicariously experiences Kusama's self-obliteration and contemplates her inner conflict of simultaneous self-loving and loathing, reflected in the conflicting tension of spatial depth and superficial vanity. One may wonder whether Kusama's interest in infinity is a metaphor for her disruption of the limitations imposed on art and her eternal quest of questioning what art can become. In such a way, Kusama's art transcends the physical and becomes spiritual, as essentially what she conceives are ideas, articulated through avant-garde constructions. Dancing among rhythmic lights, we become mesmerised by the optical illusions and sensorial experience, ultimately defying reality and becoming infinite. Through immersion in and fusion with her environments, one experiences an illusionary meditative transcendence, connecting to and empathising with her psychotic experiences, hallucinations and visions.
 
The sculptural installation The moment of regeneration, 2004, comprises fifty-five sprouting, distorted, prolific, anthropomorphic organic forms which cluster together, flourishing from the ground and unfurling towards the gallery ceiling, surging with striking scale. The exotic and tropical configurations, constructed by the process of urethane casting, are reminiscent of sea creatures, crawling tentacles and abstracted plant life. These red and black phallic forms are adorned in brightly spotted and dotted surfaces that overlay a soft fabric skin. As a visual motif, the polka dot significance is derived from the primordial origins of the universe and as Kusama expresses: 'Polka dots are a way to infinity. When we obliterate nature and our bodies with polka dots, we become part of the unity of the environment.' Therefore polka dots serve as a metaphor for the circularity of the universe, forever turning in revolution. The title has connotations of renewal and growth, inviting considerations of sexual regeneration. By disfiguring phallic symbolism, Kusama protests the male domination of societal hierarchies. This interaction of growths retaliates and challenges male power by appropriating and elongating the phallic forms, signifying Kusama's centrality as a controlling force exceeding masculinity. Yet the allusive meaning of the forms transcend sexual implications whereby the references to life and death as transitional cycles of nature attributes the work a darker, transient quality that impinges upon that very important element of humanity's existence and survival - regeneration.
 
'Mirrored Years' is a spectacular showcase of Kusama's diverse yet coherent oeuvre, synthesised by motifs of infinity, repetition, polka dots and self-obliteration which echo the energetic evocation of Kusama. The exhibition exemplifies the enchanting ability of artists to be propelled by catalysing visions, cathartic emotions and disturbing psychotic episodes, in turn transporting the audience to borderless realms. To be engulfed in 'Mirrored Years' is to willingly suspend disbelief, escape the mundane and be revitalised from a darkened existence.

 
Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 24 February - 8 June 2009.

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Image: Yayoi Kusama, Infinity mirrored room (Fireflies on the water), 2000, FNAC collection, France, courtesy the artist, Yayoi Kusama studio, Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo. &opy; the artist.