They’re the size of small sheds, but seem huge inside. Here’s the trick to Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms

Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms have generated “Hamilton”-scale hype from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles as a traveling exhibition of the works has made its way west. The Broad museum sold out its 90,000 advance tickets in mere hours on two separate days.

Since 1965, Kusama has created about 20 Infinity Mirror Rooms and she is notoriously secretive about the magic behind them.

She created her newest, "All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins," in 2016. It’s the size of a modest storage shed, but explodes with light and color inside.

Each of the artwork’s interior walls are lined with five rectangular mirrored panels. The ceiling is made up of 25 square-shaped mirrors. The floor, made of black glass, holds more than 60 fiberglass and plastic pumpkin sculptures. Each glowing sculpture, lit inside with LEDs, is adorned with dot stickers and the stems are hand painted.

The infinity effect occurs when a pair of mirrors are faced parallel to each other on opposite sides, which creates an endless field of increasingly smaller reflections.

Though each of Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms contain different objects inside, the use of mirrors and light create a singular effect: a kaleidoscopic and infinite landscape.

FOR THE RECORD
In the Oct. 20 Calendar section, an article on the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at the Broad museum said the pumpkin sculptures in “Infinity Mirrored Room — All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins” were made of fiberglass. They are made of acrylic.

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Additional credits: Deborah Vankin, Lorena Iñiguez

Photos courtesy of Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / Singapore and Victoria Miro, London.

Sources: Times reporting