There’s something wrong with this grocery store.
While the products that cover Omega Mart’s linoleum floors, products and deli counters are peculiar, there is even a serious problem in the store: customers are still misplaced in other worlds.
At Omega Mart, which opened Thursday, Santa Fe, New Mexico-based art collective Meow Wolf, used the vicinity of a grocery store to create a story that pushes the boundaries of space and reason.
The anchor tenant at Area15 is a captivating experience of 50,000 square meters in which visitors are invited to shop at a market that quickly makes way for an experimental art gallery, an indoor theme park, an escape room or a combination of the elements.
Customers should be careful not to get too far in the fridge or sneak past the PVC curtains at the deli when shopping for products like ‘Camel’s Dream of Mushroom Sop’, ‘Emergency Clams’ and’ Who Told You This Was Butter ‘did not look. counter, or slip between the shelves of the gravel roads – because it could be in another dimension.
“We create experiences that people can actively explore and discover,” says Corvas Brinkerhoff, executive creative director of Meow Wolf Las Vegas. “There are no cards. You just wander where your curiosity takes you. ”
Visitors can choose to toss the strange ball products on the grocery store shelves and through the approximately 60 rooms in the labyrinthine world outside.
Other visitors may see that the founder of the parent company Dramcorp has gone missing. And that the company’s experiments with portal technology and a mysterious addition to its products may have something to do with it. The visitors can choose to dig through the employee’s computers and archive cabinets for evidence, to ask quick questions to the HR robots and to look for clues in the pay phones, video broadcasts and deviations from the exhibit.
Origin
The premise for Omega Mart originated in Santa Fe in 2009, when artists from Meow Wolf raised money for a DIY version that amounted to more or less round blocks with bottles of colored water.
“We kept coming back to the idea of the grocery store,” says Emily Montoya, co-founder of Meow Wolf and creative director of the grocery store. ‘It’s an important part of American life, and it has a reality-shifting brand. Having a familiar environment as the starting point makes you think about what is around you. ”
Meow Wolf’s flagship attraction, the House of Eternal Return, where a family home leads to a multitude of musical mastodon skeletons and ultraviolet forests, attracted 500,000 visitors a year before it closed due to the pandemic.
COVID-19 brought the Omega Mart experience.
Otherworldly spaces, such as a desert landscape with psychedelic swirling walls and dark corridors that pulse with synchronized light, are grounded with dispenser in hand.
An interactive mirror that uses face recognition comes with a small paddle with a nose and mouth to attract the obstruction of a face mask.
COVID-19 protocols meant that some artists, such as Carey Thompson, who used light, sound, and sculpture to create a run-through Wurlitzer jukebox, had to trust that his exhibit on Zoom would be installed.
“I wanted to build something big and engaging and full of light and color and movement,” Thompson says of his Juke Temple. “They approached me to submit a proposal. And they gave me creative freedom to fuse this futuristic technology with an ancient temple. ‘
Senior creative producer Marsi Gray says Meow Wolf not only empowers artists to create what they want, but to push them further.
“One artist suggested creating an interactive robot,” says Gray. ‘We did not intend to have any robot before that. I said, ‘Why don’t you make two?’ ”
Unique Las Vegas
In 2017, Las Vegas artist Spencer Olsen created a two-dimensional wormhole as part of the Meow Wolf-backed Art Motel at the Life is Beautiful festival.
Olsen, now a creative director for Omega Mart, expanded the idea by using the bold design and graphic lighting from the first version, but replacing the matte black wormhole in the middle with a dark tube slider that leads somewhere.
“A lot of the process is in meeting rooms and playing in front of friends,” Olsen says. “Now it’s like having my imagination on the outside.”
More than 325 artists, from Las Vegas and abroad, have collaborated on Omega Mart.
“In the last four or five months, we’ve brought in all the local artists we’ve known to do the final phase,” Olsen says. ‘A lot of the contracted things looked nice – too nice. We wanted texture and artists’ hands on everything. ”
A leap forward
Brinkerhoff sees the blending of media within Omega Mart as a generational leap in storytelling.
“There’s not just one storyline to uncover,” he says. ‘It’s like an open world video game. It’s about exploration. ”
Some of the spaces to explore are only accessible by crawling through a tunnel or scaling down a rock façade or sliding head in front through a portal.
“We found that if we could get people to crawl or climb or get their bodies in different physical modes, we could open their minds,” he says.
Brinkerhoff acknowledges the likelihood that a group of “artists and strangers” from Santa Fe would have the opportunity to create something like Omega Mart.
“I hope people walk away, if we can do that, you can do anything you can dream about.”
Contact Janna Karel at [email protected]. Follow @jannainprogress on Twitter.