Infinity Mirrors wins over Toronto
AGO says ticket sales for touring exhibit stronger than ever
Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors local showing couldn’t go on forever, but Torontonians took advantage of its time here — the Art Gallery of Ontario says it was more popular here than anywhere else on its tour.
“The exhibit drew in over 165,000 people,” said the AGO’s Carly Maga. “That’s the most that the exhibition has seen so far on the tour,” which has travelled to Washington, D.C., Seattle and Los Angeles.
Hype for the show, which closed on Sunday, started months in advance. In December, people desperate for tickets waited up to 13 hours in occa- sional online queues, sometimes only to be disappointed when the ducats sold out.
Maga, who is a freelance theatre critic for the Star, said in their last online sale on March 27, the peak number of people waiting in the queue was more than 72,000.
Demand for Infinity Mirrors “was beyond anything we have seen to date. We are still calculating final attendance figures,” said Herman Lo, AGO director of visitor experience in an email. Lo added that on the second-to-last day, around 1,200 visitors tried to join the sameday ticket queue.
From March 3 to May 27, the AGO housed six mirrored rooms created by Kusama, each with a different theme and meaning.
The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away was a well-known room because it was popularized by singers such as Adele, who used images of it in one of her performances. The room is dark, with dozens of LED lights hanging from the ceiling; with mirrors on every surface, and only a small, black path for people to walk on, the lights reflect off every angle and seem to go on forever.
The catch? Groups of two to three people got 20-30 seconds in each room — not very much time to experience a room designed to seem endless.
Several of Kusama’s paintings and sculptures were also displayed.
The exhibit now heads to Cleveland from July until October, and then Atlanta.