Contemporary Art and Material Construction

Infinity Mirror Room — Phallis Field, created by Yayoi Kusama in 1965, and Strange Fruit made by Zoe Leonard between 1992 and 1997 contain many similarities, as well as contrasting qualities, through their material construction. <img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:700/1*lt2-dLH28ilNXCFyJ8_rVg.jpeg" style="height:342px; width:700px" /> Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room — Phalli’s Field, 1965. Kusama, a native Japanese artist living in New York during the height of her artistic career, used her artwork as a way to confront conventional patriarchy and sexual identity. She was most famous for her many installations including ‘infinity rooms,’ spaces within exhibitions filled with handmade material items surrounded by walls of mirrors. Infinity Mirror Room — Phalli’s Field in particular is made up of a room structured with mirrors on all surrounding walls, filled with hundreds of stuffed cloth phallic forms. Each form is covered in a series of red polka-dots of different sizes, referencing not only Kusama’s bent towards the pop-nature within her artwork, but alluding to her obsession with repetition and multiplication. Though some have partially accredited this repetition to Kusama’s schizophrenic tendencies, it can be argued that the multiplication of objects within her work is entirely intentional. In this case, Kusama’s use of repetition within the already extensively expanding ‘infinity room’ can potentially be considered a form of mocking the phallic figure within her work. <a href="https://medium.com/@hainsc/infinity-mirror-room-phallis-field-created-by-yayoi-kusama-in-1965-and-strange-fruit-made-by-4c8f6c0d77df">Click Here</a>