The found footage collective Everything Is Terrible has big, immersive plans for the soon-to-open Meow Wolf L.A. Here's what we know about its installation, 'the N.E.S.T.'
Your morning catch-up: What the attack in San Diego says about California, Hilton and Becerra are leading the governor’s race and more big storiesEverything Is Terrible co-founder Dimitri Simakis with the collective’s in-progress WoWoW sculpture for the forthcoming Meow Wolf Los Angeles.
Meow Wolf’s new West L.A. outpost will feature WoWoW, a 20-foot, 1,000-pound root-vegetable-like “alien god” anchoring Everything Is Terrible’s N.E. S.T. immersive installation. Inspired by roadside attractions and Hollywood’s unseen below-the-line workers, the N.E. S.T. imagines “Noothies” discovering a deity and hidden truths inside Meow Wolf’s 26,000-square-foot former movie multiplex.
L.A. collective Everything Is Terrible expands its VHS-obsessed, Pizza Pals pedigree into an “unrelenting joy” folk-art space rave, crafted for both selfie-takers and die-hard immersive-art explorers. When Meow Wolf’s Los Angeles location opens later this year, one of its biggest residents will be a 20-foot-tall, 1,000-pound amoeba-like creature named WoWoW. Created by the L.A. -based multimedia collective Everything Is Terrible, WoWoW is alternately described as a “cosmic entity” and a “cartoony, root vegetable floating alien god.
” The multi-eyed organism will serve as the centerpiece of “the N.E. S.T. ,” an EIT-designed section of Meow Wolf’s new 26,000-square-foot immersive exhibition space. In-progress detail of Everything Is Terrible’s WoWoW sculpture for the forthcoming Meow Wolf Los Angeles, shown with multi-color eye lighting.
That acronym has yet to be explained, and is cloaked in Meow Wolf’s intentionally mysterious messaging about its latest incarnation, which is set in an old Cinemark movie theater in West L.A. and will tackle the ephemeral joys and hardships of Hollywood’s dream factory. The L.A. location will be the Santa Fe, N.M. -based immersive art and entertainment company’s fifth outpost after Denver, Las Vegas, Houston and the Dallas suburbs.
The L.A. space boasts 45 local collaborating artists including Gabriela Ruiz, David Altmejd and more. Each is building their own unique installation featuring a variety of sculptures, dioramas and new media. Everything Is Terrible is one of Meow Wolf’s most prolific partners, creating a variety of psychedelic characters for various installations over the years. The collective dreamed up the N.E.
S.T. about two years ago as a way of paying tribute to maximalist roadside attractions like Wisconsin’s House on the Rock or New Mexico’s Tinkertown Museum. It also tells the story of the Noothies, a made-up community of former below-the-line film workers who stumbled upon a god — and a hidden truth about the nature of reality. The installation presents a paradox by being a Hollywood idea that is completely un-Hollywood.
It may wink at the industry’s unseen heroes, but who can afford to make art for art’s sake in the entertainment industry anymore? That seeming contradiction makes it a very Everything Is Terrible idea.
First look: Inside Meow Wolf L.A. , a psychedelic wonderland that celebrates the movies The Santa Fe, N.M. collective is transforming an old movie theater into a maximalist playground, complete with animated candy at a concession stand and seats that appear to be floating. Founded nearly 20 years ago by a group of friends who met at Ohio University, Everything Is Terrible was launched as a found-footage website that created wild and singular art pieces using thrifted VHS tapes.
It found viral success with videos about cat massage, and a dancing dinosaur who warns kids about the dangers of pedophilia, as well as its lauded quest to amass as many VHS copies of “Jerry Maguireas humanly possible. “I think our outlook on life has become, ‘look at the worlds that these people created,’” says EIT co-founder Dimitri Simakis.
“No one asked them to do this. Someone just wanted to do a kids puppet show in some garage in North Carolina and now they’ve created a simulacra. ”That’s also what the collective is doing with its Meow Wolf exhibit, adds Nic Maier, another EIT member.
“It’s what we’ve done for the last 20 years, really. We’re just a bunch of kooks who got together to obsessively make things in celebration of life and in appreciation of each other’s time. ” The marriage of Everything Is Terrible and Meow Wolf is a match made in heaven. The groups first met in 2009, bonded by a shared commitment to interactive art experiences that twist reality using an ornate handmade aesthetic.
A few years later, Maier was hired to work on what would become Meow Wolf’s first large-scale installation, Santa Fe’s “House of Eternal Return. ” As he spent hours sculpting large, foam trees for the group, he says he fell in love.
“We always joke that ever since then, EIT has been a barnacle on the side of the Meow Wolf ship, just hanging on but also occasionally hopping in to contribute,” Maier says. When Meow Wolf announced it was opening two new spaces, in Las Vegas and Denver, it called on EIT for ideas.
Simakis and Maier threw out a few pitches for Denver and one landed: a McDonald’s-like retro freak-out known as Pizza Pals Play Zone, which went on to become one of the attraction’s most talked about, photographed and beloved spaces.
“Pizza Pals Play Zone is super character dense,” says Han Sayles, Meow Wolf’s director of artist collaboration. “It’s just one of those spaces thatlike Meow Wolf. There’s hundreds of different pieces of media framed all around, featuring all of these different characters they created. They even made a bible … that had the narrative backstory of every single character and every deliverable they wanted for that room.
”When Meow Wolf’s Los Angeles project became a possibility, Sayles says Everything Is Terrible was one of the first groups she pitched as a potential contributor. EIT ended up being offered a custom project, in which the group used Meow Wolf’s extensive production facilities and resources to create their vision for the space, weighing in on everything from the shape of their room to the merch it might inspire in the Meow Wolf gift shop.
“We had a super trusting relationship with them,” Sayles says. “We recruited them as partners and negotiated a deal without knowing what they were going to put in the room. Both Nic and Dimitri have such a beautiful, strong sense of the exact genre of whimsy that we go for and they always deliver super deeply, so we knew it would be amazing.
” Sayles says she also thought the group’s experience of Los Angeles would lend itself well to the overall theme of the venue. Shakti Howeth, a creative director at Meow Wolf, agrees, saying that while Meow Wolf attractions are typically pretty otherworldly, they’re always built around At Meow Wolf’s “Omega Mart,” in Las Vegas, guests first enter a satiric take on a grocery store, where portals lead to otherworldly art exhibitions. The N.E. S.T.
, Howeth teases, will relate to some of the L.A. attraction’s character groups and themes, as well as its overall story. How audiences first encounter WoWoW and the N.E. S.T. will depend on which door they use to enter the room. From there, the points of visual interest will compound upon each other.
“We’re just incorporating all the things we love,” says Maier, noting that includes roadside attractions, folk art and anything “outsider. ” “It involves everything from the importance of dirt and worms to video games to experimental film to worker uprisings to entering literal other dimensions where you can meet what might be God, all within a -square-foot space,” Simakis adds.
“There have been times when we’ve been in the N.E. S.T. and thought we crammed in too much ... but then you realize it has to be like that, because we’re trying to tell the whole story of the universe in just that room. ” For example, Maier spent much of the last two years building 45 beautifully weird costumes for the attraction, only two of which will be physically in the N.E. S.T.
The other 43, he explains, are there for “world-building” and to make the story feel lived in. Everything in the space will have been created by Everything Is Terrible and Meow Wolf, including what seems like real found footage. This superfan is buying VHS copies of ‘The Mummy.
’ The size of his collection is shocking Evan Halleck says pursuing this project is “the most creatively alive” he’s felt since moving to L.A. 12 years ago to start his film career. Simakis calls the group’s vision for the space “unrelenting joy mixed with benevolent chaos,” as well as “a beautiful folk art museum that’s also a space rave.
” He likens what the group is doing to “building a puzzle out of thousands of other puzzles, gluing it together to make a new thing. ” “It’s like we’re making a movie that’s not a movie,” Simakis adds.
“It’s a video game. It’s a living space. It’s all of these things, but you get to walk around in it. ”If that’s confusing, it’s because it’s meant to be — at least a little.
How each visitor absorbs or receives the space will be entirely up to them. And while that could be a bit terrifying for some artists, to pour everything into a piece only to have the public possibly misinterpret or even ignore it, Maier and Simakis say they’re open to whatever comes.
“Millions of people are going to potentially walk through our space, so it has to be really special,” Simakis says. “We’ve also thought about all the different ways people could enjoy it, whether they’re a baby or a stoner or someone who’s just really into immersive entertainment or escape rooms. Even if you just go to take selfies, great. We’re pro-that.
But also, if you want to keep going back or you want to spend hours there, I promise we’ve made it worth your while. ”Get a first look at the immersive art exhibit that takes over 80 rooms in a shuttered downtown L.A. hospitalEntertainment & Arts
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