For once, what happened in Vegas shouldn’t stay in Las Vegas. Meow Wolf, the art collective that has successfully merged critical acclaim, creative force, and financial success, has done it again with Omega Mart, an interdimensional grocery store.
When I first viewed the original Meow Wolf installation in Santa Fe a number of years ago, I was wowed by the completely unimagined complexity of it. The House of Eternal Return presented a combination of immersive art and supernatural haunted house that was mind-bending.
Approaching the Omega Mart concept in Las Vegas was different going in: I knew the kind of artist-realized amusement-park-for-the-senses that I’d experience there.
The Las Vegas iteration is enormous – some 50,000-square-feet located at Las Vegas’ Area 15, and the location’s star.
It seems trivial to say it is enormously clever and humorous, but it is that. Encouraging visitors to uncover a mystery involving aliens, corporate greed, and a take-over by AI, visitors enter through a surreal version of a mega grocery store, explore an alien farming world, a series of corporate offices and mind-alteration areas, a factory, and even enjoy a ride down a fast slide (below) over the course of three floors.
Both cautionary fairytale and pure American success story gone mad, Omega Mart is brilliantly subversive and witty.
My favorite section is the large scale grocery section, with its frightening alien meat counter, strange cat foods, dice-rather-than-pit bearing avocados, zippered avocados (I mean, why not?), and strategically placed video monitors that provide visitors with an introduction to the founder of Omega Mart and his disappearance.
I could’ve spent hours exploring each hilarious food item and laundry product, and there is so much visual stimulation and color that it would be easy for any visitor to do so. But onward, and inward.
Slipping into the back of the store, from one entrance portal or another, the next space is the alien farming community, in which people are disappearing, and a seemingly idyllic existence with surreal flowers and swirling colors. Continue on into the ominous factory space, or travel upstairs to the employee break room and take in a few training videos that will help you find clues as to just exactly what’s going on with the company behind Omega Mart’s products.
The corporate area of Omega Mart includes an interactive AI robot, more clue-filled video portals, and employee cubicles and offices in which attendees can search through computers and files to uncover more mysteries. Branching off from this area are research labs and conference rooms, areas that I thought of as pure interactive art, including a musical room, tunnels of lights, mirrored experiences that seem to defy reality.
All in all there are over 250 art works created by more than 325 artists. The adventure of Omega Mart is to some extent a customized experience, much like the best of video gaming. Linger in one section or another, follow whatever plotline or discovery portal you wish. The basic premise is that the grocery store’s success and its products, as well as the disappearance of its founder and other individuals, are all connected to something called “The Source,” harvested and used by the corporation behind Omega Mart.
There is a resistance, the disappeared, the store staff – follow the story arc you wish. The only aspect you truly must follow is the art. Digital and in constant liquid motion or brightly rooted as the strange flowers growing on one entrance portal’s wall, there is something new to “not miss” around every corner.
Approximately 7 times larger than Meow Wolf’s original Santa Fe installation, and with a more layered and contextual storyline, Omega Mart is both brilliantly entertaining and glittering; over the top and even a bit overwhelming – at least when wearing a pandemic-safe KN-95. It is the ultimate in Las Vegas showmanship seamlessly merged with accessible, stimulating, and often dazzlingly original art.
If you’d like a souvenir, you can purchase one before you leave the Omega Mart store – perhaps you’d like a can of “Camel’s Dream of Mushroom Soup” for dinner, or a pair of lettuce sandals. And while you’re there, pick up a few cans of pigeon mousse for your kitty.
Viva Las Vegas.
Omega Mart is located at 3215 S. Rancho Dr., Las Vegas, NV 89102
- Genie Davis; photos: Genie Davis & provided by Meow Wolf
