It's no wonder why the Serpentine Gallery was chosen for this exhibition. As you make your way off the busy, crowded metro and into the relaxing calm of Kensington Park you can already begin to feel your mind letting go of appointments, anxieties, deadlines, and other social pressures.

Gathering smiles from all over the world in one place

As you near the entrance to the gallery, the doors are wide open and you are greeted with an invitation to record your smile for the #smilesfilm project. This is an attempt by Ono to link people from all over the world by gathering their smiles in one place. If you want to add your smile to this project you do not need to visit the gallery, you can simply upload your smile onto twitter with the hash tag #smilesfilm.

Encouraging us to open our minds and use our imaginations by looking beyond the periphery

Although Ono's TO THE LIGHT combines new and old works, persistent themes of essentialism and breaking away from conventional ways of perceiving the world can be experienced within every work. In A Blue Room Event 1996, Ono writes on the left side of the wall "This room gets as wide as an ocean at the other end" and as she continues to write her letters become progressively smaller at the other end of the room. In this way, many of her works encourage us to open our minds and use our imaginations by looking beyond the periphery of the artwork itself. Stategically placed throughout the exhibition are prompts like: "This is the ceiling" but it is written on the floor, or "This is not here."

She challenges the concept of the visitor as the viewer by making them a direct participant in the art work. In Amaze, Ono presents a glass maze which the visitor can attempt to walk through. Because the walls of the maze are made of see through glass it is difficult to determine if the steps you take will result in safe passage or a painful and embarrassing slam into a wall. While I was there, a small girl around the age of two was trying her luck at the maze and subsequently ran into one of the glass walls and began to cry. An onlooker, a man in his forties who had seen the child, then decided to try his luck in the maze. Just as he was attempting to find the entrance he too walked straight into a glass wall. In this way, Ono has produced a work in which the visitor is the observed and part of the artwork. This scene also seemed to say something about the way we perceive each other - even when we see the mistakes of others, we believe when faced with the same situation that we are above making those same mistakes. Maybe this is because we are older and society tells us the old are the wise, or maybe it's because we genuinely believe we are smarter and better. Whatever the reason, Amaze encourages us to be cautious with how we perceive others' failures and our own pride.

Looking back her memories on "Footsteps"

Ono admits in "Footsteps to the sky" that even she is continuously looking for new ways to view her art and, in turn, the world. In this work, Ono and John Lennon had recorded their footprints on a sheet of paper. She says at first they had made it so that their footprints fit within the boarders of the paper, but then decided to have them coming off of the paper because then it made it look as if they were going somewhere. Years later after John's death, Ono admits looking back at these footprints and thinking that if she put the paper vertically it would appear they are walking up to heaven, and so that is what she did.

Ono's works are timeless

One of the amazing revelations about this exhibition is just how timeless Ono's works are. They inspire us to see the people, things, and circumstances on unconventional terms, challenge stereotypical ways of thinking, and open our imaginations to new possibilities.