Love is calling, of course. Isn’t it always? The love between mother and child, between lovers, between us and nature, and between the known and the unknown and inside ourselves. That’s exactly what artist Yayoi Kusama wants you to feel when you enter her “Love is Calling” immersive infinity room – a sense of limitless possibility that breaks the boundaries of time and space.
It’s at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) now until Feb. 11, 2024. The exhibition was planned for 2020-2021, but those plans changed due to the pandemic. No matter, because it’s here now and associate curator Jennifer Inacio told us the timing couldn’t be better.
(Emily Cardenas for Biscayne Times)
Wear polka dots to become one with the exhibit.
“It’s funny, because it arrived at a moment when Kusama is everywhere and has a lot of installations in other museums, so we’re happy to have it here at this time,” she said.
As you enter “Love is Calling,” which has been installed in a corner of the museum’s vast second floor, you are immediately absorbed by the contrasting darkness and light of this exhibition featuring Kusama’s signature polka dots that multiply in the mirrored space. I wore my own black polka dots for the occasion to become one with the room, moving around the illuminated inflatable tentacles hanging from the ceiling and rising from the floor. Upon close examination, you’ll see how the forms are carefully stitched as air pumps through them, so they come alive and sway ever so softly while glowing with shifting hues of color.
“Dots are symbols of the world, the cosmos. The Earth is a dot, the moon, the sun, the stars are all made up of dots. You and me, we are dots,” Kusama once said in an interview to explain the recurring theme of her life’s work.
You’ll hear her voice constantly playing throughout the exhibition, reciting a love poem in Japanese written by her. In English, the poem’s title translates to “Residing in a Castle of Shed Tears.” Exploring existential themes including life and death, the poem expresses Kusama’s hope to spread a universal message of love through her art. Perhaps she is remembering the tears she shed while trying to convince her parents to abandon their insistence that she marry into wealth instead of becoming the artist she was born to be.
(Emily Cardenas for Biscayne Times)
The “Love is Calling” infinity room features Yayoi Kusama’s signature polka dots on inflatable tentacles hanging from the ceiling and rising from the floor of a 560-square-foot space.
“Love is Calling” is the largest of Kusama’s 20 infinity rooms, measuring 560 square feet, but made to feel more expansive through mirrored panels. Her first darkened infinity room, “Fireflies on the Water,” was constructed in 2000; “Love is Calling” premiered in Japan 13 years later. It was quickly acquired by Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art for its permanent collection, where it was displayed before being loaned to PAMM.
Kusama’s immersive experiences are meant to be transcendental, to provide a different perspective on the infinite. She wants you to contemplate the meaning of the universe, but that’s honestly not going to happen in the two-minute time frame you are allowed to spend inside “Love is Calling.”
Upon paying your museum entrance fee of $16 ($12 for seniors and students), you are offered available time slots to view the infinity room. Patrons line up within stanchions outside the exhibition walls and are allowed to enter six at a time. The serenity is quickly interrupted two minutes later when a door opens and you’re asked to exit. Spend too much time taking selfies and you’ll miss out on feeling that sense of wonder because it’s over in the blink of an eye.
(Emily Cardenas for Biscayne Times)
Be sure to pick up a Yayoi Kusama souvenir in the PAMM gift shop.
“I always recommend taking the first minute to let it sink in and observe how your reflection may get lost in the mirrors … think about how you see yourself and how you lose yourself within the space and how you find yourself too,” Inacio said, before also reflecting on how lighthearted it can also be. “It’s also a really fun exhibition as well … it’s very magical.”
So enjoy it, and then pick up a souvenir. Perhaps you’ll contemplate the universe later.
Leandro Erlich’s “Liminal”
(Emily Cardenas for Biscayne Times)
Looking down into an elevator shaft in Leandro Erlich’s “Liminal.”
Fortunately, there is another immersive, mind-bending exhibition at PAMM through September of this year that can be roamed through freely with no rush, allowing you to make a day of your visit. Leandro Erlich’s “Liminal” comprises 16 mixed-media installations that provide cheeky views into ordinary life. It took two months and a huge team to install.
“Leandro invites us to look at the everyday with a different eye,” Inacio said.
Indeed, he does.
Look down into an elevator shaft or watch the doors to a faux elevator open and close with life-size video of different people inside. Enter “changing rooms” and look in the mirror only to be surprised by others doing the same thing who appear in your line of sight behind you. Sit in a room of strategically placed black boxes and see your own reflection now sitting in a classroom desk on the other side of a glass wall. Walk through a passageway as if in an underground subway and hear trickles of water. Pass by a wall of “washing machines” and see a simulation of laundry spinning in circles. Peak through Venetian blinds to watch videos of people in windows moving through their daily lives as if you were in an apartment building spying on your neighbors.
(/Emily Cardenas for Biscayne Times)
Leandro Erlich’s “Swimming pool” is on display on PAMM’s terrace, allowing visitors to see each other above and below a layer of water contained in suspended glass.
The visual paradoxes and illusions are everywhere to test your perceptions, but the pièce de résistance is “Swimming pool” (created in 2008), located outside on the museum’s wooden terrace. The pool allows viewers to see people through a layer of water contained in suspended glass. Walk down under the pool’s blue-painted walls and now you’re looking up through the water at people and the museum landscape as if in some sort of suspended reality.
“Liminal” was organized by guest curator Dan Cameron and is the Argentine artist’s first North American show of his collective works, spanning more than 20 years of production. Erlich is an award-winning conceptual artist and when you experience his brilliance for yourself, you’ll understand why.
About Yayoi Kusama
93-year-old Yayoi Kusama is an icon of contemporary art and master of optical illusion, who has interwoven pop art with minimalism and psychedelia throughout her paintings, performances, room-size presentations, outdoor sculptural installations, literary works, films and designs.
She was a fixture of the 1960s New York City art scene, where her performance art explored antiwar, antiestablishment and free love ideas. Those happenings often involved public nudity to test the boundaries of identity, sexuality and the body. In “Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead (1969),” Kusama painted dots on participants’ naked bodies in an unauthorized performance in the fountain of the sculpture garden at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
(Harrie Verstappen for Magnolia Pictures)
Yayoi Kusama in the Orez Gallery in the Hague, Netherlands, in 1965, as seen in the documentary “Kusama – Infinity.”
The self-described “obsessional artist” abruptly returned to Japan in 1973 to enter an art therapy program at a Tokyo mental hospital to treat the hallucinations that had plagued her since the age of 10. She’s created art continuously since the 1970s, working out of a studio with assistants across the street from the hospital and returning to the institution at night.
Kusama was brought up in a relatively wealthy family that opposed her interest in art; she was reportedly beaten by her mother to force her to stop. She went on to study at an art college in Kyoto and it was her psychiatrists who convinced her parents to let Kusama go to New York in 1958 to pursue her dreams. Kusama’s popularity exploded in 1989 after a retrospective of her work in New York and she remains one of the most celebrated artists to come out of Japan.
Tips for Visiting
Parking A convenient on-site parking garage that’s shared with the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Sc
Dining The on-site Verde restaurant is a gem frequented by diners who go just for the food and cocktails, not having bought a ticket to enter the museum. This is why reservations are recommended – don’t think you can just saunter in and get a table. Perhaps you’ll get lucky, but don’t count on it. Instead, think ahead and book a table. The restaurant and museum are closed Tuesday and Wednesday, and Verde opens only until 4 p.m. on Monday and Friday to Sunday (the bar remains open until 5:30 p.m.). For a special treat, go on a Thursday and stay for dinner when the restaurant is open until 8 p.m. Otherwise, quench your thirst or satisfy that hunger pang with a light bite from the food kiosk and enjoy the expansive first floor terrace with views of Biscayne Bay, or sit on a bench in the surrounding Museum Park just steps away.