An interactive exhibition featuring over a million brightly coloured stickers has proven a major draw card for the Dunedin Public Art Gallery (DPAG).
More than 75,000 people have visited the dynamic Obliteration Room exhibition over the last three months. Visitors were given a sheet of different-sized coloured stickers, and encouraged to add them to the furniture, objects and surfaces of the domestic scene.
DPAG director Cam McCracken is delighted with how the public has responded to the piece, with many returning multiple times to see how it had changed.
"We like to have a diverse exhibition programme with a serious art product," he says.
"But we like to pepper that with things that really capture the public's imagination."
It was also a way of encouraging non-arts audiences to explore other parts of the art gallery during their visit.
"We've looked at people's movements around the galleries. They didn't just come to this exhibition. This might have been the reason why they came in, but they certainly moved around the other parts of the building."
The aim of exhibition was to transform the large-scale installation from a stark white interior into an extraordinary blur of colours, matching the 'wall of noise' with the artist's vision.
"Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama had hallucinogenic experiences when she was a young girl," says Mr McCracken.
"She talks about seeing dots and spots and colours everywhere. So over the last three months we've turned this pristine white environment into what she might have seen as a child."
Visitors covered the white rooms with more than 1.5 million coloured dots before the exhibition wrapped up on Saturday. Staff are now working to uninstall the work, but luckily they're not having to remove each of those stickers individually.
"No, we knew what we were getting into when we installed it", laughs Mr McCracken.
"So all the walls are specially lined, the floor is a false floor. So it's really just a case of peeling off a layer of walls and floors and then recycling the material."
The interactive nature of the exhibition was similar to the gallery's 2014 popular work, The Cubic Structural Evolution Project, by Olafur Eliasson. That exhibition, featuring 120,000 white lego blocks attracted more than 72,000 visitors, and later toured widely around the country.
Newshub.
