REVIEW: [EXXOPOLIS] by Architects of Air @ Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham

EXXOPOLIS by Architects of Air
Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham

In early June, the Lakeside Arts Centre in Nottingham hosted a lunimarium installation featuring latticework, and luminescent seams which create colours of light against iridescent hues to create an sensory immersive experience.

"A lunamarium is a sculpture people enter to be moved to a sense of wonder at the beauty of light and colour..."

Seeing EXXOPOLIS from the outside reminded me of a children's bouncing castle, the inflated plastic and children-friendly 'bounciness'. The true extraordinary spectrum of colour was concealed by an exterior of grey so it was hard to say what lay beyond. All visitors are asked to take their shoes off beforehand, and I wasn't surprised to see that most of the visitors were families with young children.

The images of EXXOPOLIS do not do the actual experience justice. The saturation of colour from space to space is so vivid and almost blinding in some cases, that it is only after your intital encounter with it that you become comfortable with the colours around you. The space is like a cave, divided by large coves that are led by a series of smaller tunnels and passageways that interlink every space together. Each space contains a colour, from green to red to blues. What surprised me was the intensity of the colour in each space, especially where one moves from one space to the next, the difference in hue is quite hard to negotiate in sight. Due to the nature of the material and the way EXXOPOLIS is made, it gives you a seamless impression, an enveloping series of colour and light that seems to invade from all sides. In some cases you need a few moments to adjust to the intensity before you are able to marvel and wonder at the otherworldiness of your environment.

"It is a paradox that that such a stimulating environment can simultaneously be so calming. Many people find the lunimaria a place for rest or meditation."

REVIEW: [Yayoi Kusama Retrospective] @ Tate Modern, London

Tate Modern recently revealed its new retrospective for the renowned Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama.

"Her art has an almost hallucinatory intensity that reflects her unique vision of the world, whether through a teeming accumulation of detail or the dense patterns of polka dots that have become her signature. The incessant quality of this gesture is both obsessive and meditative.

In the late 1990s, Kusama returned to making room size installations. In her installations, this image of bourgeois stasis is turned into something surreal and uncanny. All the room and furnishing covered with sticker spots which glow. The polka dot can be the visual shorthand signifying her hallucinatory visions. Covering in a room in psychedelic polka dots might be her attempt to visualise and restage the experience of her own hallucinatory episodes, during which she senses the physical world overtaken by endlessly repeated forms. Her representation of her inner world results in an installation that is fantastical and potentially unsettling. Spots are more readily experienced as interruptions of our own field of vision rather than a surface motif.

I'm Here But Nothing (2000) by Yayoi Kusama

I'm Here But Nothing (2000) by Yayoi Kusama

Her piece 'Infinity Mirror Room' is a depiction of infinite space. Reflecting surfaces has become a recurring element in her work. Large scale environments that viewers can walk into and explore. She proposes an experience for the infinite, inviting the viewer to suspend his or her sense of self -accompanying Kusama on her ongoing journey of self-obliteration." -Tate Modern