![]() In all, there are four vast, themed areas and 60 unique environments created by more than 325 artists in Santa Fe, across the country and around the world. In today's world, you need to get lost."īeyond the grocery store, the Omega Mart experience takes visitors to the corporate offices and factory of the fictional Dramcorp - a "cyber-spiritual corporation that creates technology to open the possibility to move groceries to other worlds," in Montoya's telling. "They're both beautiful in their own way," Knaul said. Las Vegas resident Karl Knaul, who was using his RFID card to get clues Thursday, took a moment to compare the Vegas expansion with the House of Eternal Return, which he has visited. "In this space, we have done a better job in pointing where the story is going." "We certainly don't want to hold people's hands in the experience, but people do appreciate a few clues," said Joanna Garner, Meow Wolf's senior story creative director. But it's clear that in the five years since the House of Eternal Return's opening, the company has progressed leaps and bounds with technology.Įach Omega Mart visitor is issued a radio frequency identification, or RFID, card that can be used to access story clues throughout the exhibit. "I didn't know what was happening in them."Įverything at Omega Mart is part of a bigger story that visitors can unravel as little or as much as they want. "There are rooms I only saw last week," she said. ![]() Though she's the creative director, Omega Mart was no less a discovery for Montoya this time around. We turn it on its head and show the weirdness of it." ![]() "Everybody has a notion of what to expect. "Everyone has had the experience of walking into a grocery store," said Emily Montoya, senior vice president of brand, creative director of Omega Mart and one of the group's founders. What makes a grocery store the perfect fit for Las Vegas and Meow Wolf's first expansion? This time, the artists had 52,000 square feet to play with, nearly triple the square footage and seven times the cubic footage of Santa Fe's Meow Wolf. The Omega Mart concept dates to Meow Wolf's beginnings in 2008, when the group staged its first offerings in less than 1,000 square feet of a warehouse on Hopewell Street. That includes entering a glass-door beverage cooler (reminiscent of walking through the refrigerator at Meow Wolf's House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe) and coming out the other side in another dimension. Multicolored floor tiles speak vaguely of the 1950s, as does the packaging for products with names like Lil Meow and Health Wolf pet food.īut walk around for a moment, and a futuristic twist on a grocery store memory becomes sensory overload as the back of the store offers eight portals to an alternate reality. Walk into Omega Mart and you might think you are in a supermarket of a bygone age. Omega Mart fills one-third of the 135,000 square feet of immersive entertainment experiences within Area15's 200,000-square-foot structure. ![]() "It's incredible, but it's weird," said Kathy Ikeman, who was finishing up a visit to Las Vegas from Minneapolis. "It's our proof that Santa Fe is not just a fluke," said Corvas Brinkerhoff, one of Meow Wolf's original founders and executive creative director of Meow Wolf Las Vegas.Īs became commonplace in Santa Fe, when Meow Wolf began drawing seemingly endless lines of visitors to a onetime bowling alley on Rufina Street, the art collective's new offerings perplexed and fascinated its first visitors.
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