Repetition and pattern

Kusama

How do marks follow each other, almost as if under a gravitational pull, a safety net, a way to conquer the subject by a strength in numbers?

SHOP KUSAMA

Pure optical situations reveal connections of a new type which are no longer sensory-motor and which bring the emancipated senses into direct relation with time and thought. This is the very special extension of the Pure Optical image: to make time and thought perceptible, to make them visible and of sound.p.65

Yayoi Kusama produces work that relies heavily on pattern and repetition. Her own issues with mental illness feed this repetition. She attributes the repetition to her problems at home when she was a child.
Remember Jullien stating that everyone has a mental illness.

In film, the still image is in vain, like the foreboding of a car breakdown, like watching out for death.p.63

 In slowing down this pattern, one can see that within such a long structure there sit thousands of individual frames, instances of death. I believe that Kusama, just like many scientists who have a high powered microscope, overlay the pattern of living organisms that cover everything.

There is an interesting play that occurs between a pattern's gaze and the subject's. It is difficult to focus on a complex pattern so the gaze upon a pattern such as Kusama's is one that is diffused upon contact. The gaze will run more complex algorithms in order to narrow the gaze.