Falling Inward | Mike Nyerges

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It’s a Yayoi Kusama Universe

It’s a Yayoi Kusama Universe!

Yayoi Kusama has brought such joy, beauty and whimsy to the world. The news arrived as it always does, in the morning, reading that she was 97 and passed away. August 14, 2026.

May her work continue to delight and inspire.

I share here what little I have to share of her work, but also something of how her obsessions leak into my work: infinity, iteration, quantum-level abstraction.

I’ve treasured my photo of Yayoi Kusama’s “Venus,” “Statue of Venus Obliterated by Infinity Nets.” This work of hers once filled a wall at the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) of the University of Rochester. Red-dot covered life-size, but minimalist statue of Venus against a field of red dots. An iterated past, fixed, a goddess trapped in need of liberation Venus. My answer, transformed to the point of vanishing.

I don’t believe I ever printed my rendering of “Venus” or Kusama’s other work shared here, which is from the New York Botanical Garden, 2021. They are the lushly painted flowers and water reflections in and around the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory’s water gardens. Her work was elsewhere too, including an infinity room—we entered, we stood, we photographed. Mais bien sûr !

Also in the collection are a few of my Kusama-inspired photos in the hope they expand the Yayoi Kusama Universe, be it ever so slightly.

— August 2026 —

 

In the Tombs of the Living

In the Tombs of the Living

A walk in the winter woods at the end of the day. The once green turrets of the trees empty in the lavender sky. The dance of shadows at their feet falling still. A final photograph, then home, and a martini and the evening news.

Crushed beneath concrete, the cries of children silenced.
‘Paper beats rock. Rock beats scissors. Scissors beats paper.’
Sins of the father.

What did Marilynne Robinson write? In The Death of Adam? “So far as we can tell, only we among the creatures can even form the thought that the world is cruel.”

And tomorrow? Another walk into the woods. The fetishism of beauty. Then dinner out, dining in the tombs of the living.

— January 2026 —

Was Hope Abandoned?

Was Hope Abandoned?

What secrets lie within these walls, disclosed here by machine intelligence? Was love hidden from its view? The burdens of deceit weighed and measured in rooms of concealment?

Did I not recognize the prompts of fear and anger? Was it the memory of a woman with a child, abandoned, a shadow in a narrow room brushing her hair?

A man in physical ruin crawling through the mud in a prisoner of war camp to an open latrine, desperate for relief, falling in?

Were the shelters for happiness not considered? Was all hope abandoned? Was it the AI!

— December 2025 —

Man of Sorrows

Man of Sorrows

This 16th century, life-size wooden sculpture, “Man of Sorrows,” by an unknown artist, strips away all pretense of certainty in an uncertain world. It lays bare the vulnerabilities we share, especially the pain of the innocent who are forsaken, scorned, condemned. 

It is this visible agony that speaks, shouts, screams, of how in the long arc of history there are always those who view the outsider as a threat—that the way they speak, what they say, what they believe, and with whom they associate are a danger—and who view kindness as weakness, choose cruelty as an antidote to mercy, and see anger as strength.

Sitting in the bare, vaulted space of where this carving now rests, in Cologne’s Great St. Martin Church, a church that was nearly destroyed by the bombing of World War II—a destruction that followed a harvest of terror—I asked who are these people and those they cast out? And I was answered, we are them, they are us. Our natures are shaped by the challenges of survival in a past from which this Man of Sorrows would free us—that we are easily mislead and our fears, hopes, dreams easily exploited by the powerful. 

What can we expect of ourselves in such world? For me, it has become the simple expectation expressed by Micah, who warned against apathy and called the powerful to account. “Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God.”   

— June 2025 —