#LEVEL 115 MEOW MATCH FULL#

'It's all about reinventing the mundane spaces and trying to get you to reengage with a sense of curiosity and possibility to remember to wonder,' Montoya says. That may be an oversimplification, and a relatively direct message for Las Vegas, but the wide-angled Meow Wolf Omega Mart look - part Andy Warhol, part childhood cartoons and part retro monster-movie aesthetics (pay close attention to the piñatas modeled after the seven deadly sins) - is meant to welcome us, and then unravel until we no longer have a clear sense of place. Fridges storing drinks become winding passageways, T-shirt racks give way to hedge mazes, and soon we're in multistory rock canyons with projected imagery, glass that seems to come alive with animation and corporate factories with robot receptionists.Īll of it taken together, for those who want to dig deep, is designed to have us think about who we are in relation to the brands and the corporations that seek to define us and our environment. The Omega Mart is modeled to look like a typical grocery store, only here a deli contains a block of cheese molded after Edvard Munch's 'The Scream,' and others are designed to capture more religious imagery. Then it perceives you as having a face.'Īnd in a weird, unintentional way, it may even better serve the Omega Mart message, a place that fuses old-fashioned illusions with modern tech to get us out of our own heads.

You hold up a ping-pong paddle with the lower half of a face printed on it, and then it works. 'We were like, 'Are we taking this out? Can we fix the programming?' We came up with an analog solution. 'If you're wearing a face mask, it doesn't perceive you as having a face,' says Emily Montoya, one of Meow Wolf's cofounders and Omega Mart creative director. So no, you will not be able to take off your mask to play with Meow Wolf's fancy new face scanners. In Las Vegas, Meow Wolf has the green light and is eager to show the world that it believes its vision for Omega Mart, a place where all-enveloping designs aim to turn the guest into a protagonist, is not just the future of themed entertainment but a locale that can respond to our troubled times even as it provides respite from them.

#LEVEL 115 MEOW MATCH FULL#

It remains shuttered.īut COVID regulations in America, of course, vary state to state.įlorida's Walt Disney World has been open since last summer, whereas Anaheim's Disneyland is unlikely to resume full theme park operations for months to come. Meow Wolf's foundational location, the House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, where a suburban home constructed in a former bowling alley is a stepping stone to black-lighted, handcrafted forests that lead to glowing, prehistoric musical bones and intergalactic space stations, among numerous other oddities, was drawing 500,000 visitors per year before the pandemic.

And as evidenced by Omega Mart selling out its opening weekend, many are ready for a place that feels like a return to normalcy. Depending on your perspective, Meow Wolf's Omega Mart is an art gallery, an indoor theme park, a bold statement on individual theatricality, a place to take lots of Instagram photos or the sort of indoor space that should be avoided at all costs by the nonvaccinated during a pandemic. The Omega Mart, located a few minutes off the Las Vegas Strip, aims to further Meow Wolf's goal of marrying experimental art, theme park-inspired design and ambitious ideas on how we play in physical spaces. The bad news: The scanners don't work with face masks.īut where others see restrictions, Meow Wolf tends to see opportunities. There are face scanners for guests to toy with inside the 52,000-square-foot exhibition space that immersive entertainment company Meow Wolf is opening Thursday in Las Vegas.

Level 115 meow match