There is something wrong with this grocery store.
While the products that line the Omega Mart linoleum floors, the delicatessen product section and counter are peculiar even under close scrutiny, the store faces a more pressing problem: customers continue to get lost in other worlds.
At the Omega Mart, which opened on Thursday, the art collective Meow Wolf, from Santa Fe, New Mexico, used the backdrop of a grocery store to create a story that transcends the limits of space and reason.
The anchor tenant at Area15 is an immersive 50,000-square-foot experience in which visitors are invited to shop in a market that quickly gives way to an experimental art gallery, a covered theme park, an escape room or some combination of these elements .
While browsing products like “Camel’s Dream of Mushroom Sop”, “Emergency Clams” and “Who Told You This Was Butter”, customers must be careful not to go too far in the beverage refrigerator or sneak past the delicatessen’s PVC curtains counter, or slide between the cereal aisle shelves – as they can be in a different dimension.
“We create experiences that allow people to actively explore and discover,” says Corvas Brinkerhoff, executive creative director at Meow Wolf Las Vegas. “There are no maps. You just wander where your curiosity takes you. “
Visitors can choose from eccentric products on supermarket shelves and wander through 60 or more rooms in the labyrinthine world beyond.
Other visitors may notice that the founder of the parent company Dramcorp is missing. And that the company’s experiments with portal technology and a mysterious additive in its products may have something to do with it. These visitors can choose to search employees’ computers and files for evidence, ask questions directed at HR robots and look for clues on the exhibition’s public phones, video broadcasts and anomalies.
Origins
The Omega Mart premise originated in Santa Fé in 2009, when Meow Wolf artists saved money for a DIY version that amounted to little more than concrete block shelves with colored water bottles.
“We keep going back to the grocery store idea,” says Emily Montoya, co-founder of Meow Wolf and creative director of the grocery store. “It is a staple of American life and has this mark that distorts reality. Having a family atmosphere as a starting point makes you think about what is around you. “
Miau Wolf’s main attraction, the House of Eternal Return, where a family home leads to a multiverse of musical skeletons of mastodons and ultraviolet forests, attracted 500,000 visitors a year before being closed because of the pandemic.
COVID-19 required modifications to the Omega Mart experience.
Supernatural spaces, like a deserted landscape, with psychedelic spiral walls and dark corridors that pulse with synchronized light are grounded with hand sanitizer dispensers at each end.
An interactive mirror that uses facial recognition comes with a small paddle printed with a nose and mouth, to circumvent the obstruction of a facial mask.
The COVID-19 protocols meant that some artists, like Carey Thompson, who used light, sound and sculpture to create a Wurlitzer walk-through jukebox, had to trust that their exhibit would be installed over Zoom.
“I wanted to build something big, engaging and full of light, color and movement,” says Thompson of his Juke Temple. “They came to me to submit a proposal. And they gave me creative freedom to merge this futuristic technology with an ancient temple. “
Senior creative producer Marsi Gray says Meow Wolf’s practice is not just to empower artists to create what they want, but to take them even further.
“An artist proposed the creation of an interactive robot,” says Gray. “We weren’t planning on having any robots before that. I said, ‘Why don’t you do two?’ “
Exclusively Las Vegas
In 2017, Las Vegas artist Spencer Olsen created a two-dimensional wormhole as part of the Art Motel sponsored by Meow Wolf at the Life is Beautiful festival.
Olsen, now creative director at Omega Mart, expanded the idea, incorporating the bold design and graphic lighting of the first iteration, but replacing the matte black wormhole in the center with a dark tube that leads … somewhere.
“A large part of the process takes place in meeting rooms and make-believe games with friends,” says Olsen. “Now it’s like having my imagination outside.”
More than 325 artists, from Las Vegas and abroad, collaborated on Omega Mart.
“In the past four or five months, we brought in all the local artists we knew to make the final round,” says Olsen. “Many of the things contracted looked good – too beautiful. We wanted texture and the hands of artists in everything. “
A leap forward
Brinkerhoff considers the media mix at Omega Mart to be a generational leap in narrative.
“There is not just one plot to discover,” he says. “It’s like an open-world video game. It is about exploration. “
Some of the spaces to be explored can only be accessed by crawling through a tunnel, climbing a rock facade or sliding upside down on a portal.
“We found that if we can make people crawl or climb or put their bodies in different physical ways, we can open their minds,” he says.
Brinkerhoff recognizes the improbability of a group of “artists and crazy people” from Santa Fé having the opportunity to create something like the Omega Mart.
“I hope people leave with the feeling that if we can do this, you can do anything you dream about.”
Contact Janna Karel at [email protected]. follow @jannainprogress on twitter.