▼ Culture Immersive Emergence Dallas Art spaces keep up with interactive, immersive and Instagram trends. BY KENDALL MORGAN T he shapes on the walls shift from pastel clouds to water lilies, to the view of an air balloon de- scending onto a scene in the Belle Epoque. At the immersive art exhibition showcasing Claude Monet and other Impressionists, their works envelop and swirl around the room along to the cre- scendoing booming orchestra in Ravel’s “Bolero.” The pro- jected images often spill onto the floor, creating the illusion that, à la Mary Poppins, visitors have jumped and walked into a painting. While this idea was once only possible through the high- tech imagination of Disney fiction, it’s become almost ex- pected in the art world, and Dallas is keeping up with artgoers’ taste for interactive, pop-up, immersive art. Back in the olden days of the 20th century, if you wanted to engage with a work of art, you needed to enter a museum. Through hushed halls, viewers tried to get as close to a painting or sculpture as possible while trying to avoid being silenced or told to step back by a security guard. But in 2022, the ways we consume art have changed dras- tically. At exhibitions such as Lighthouse Immersive’s Im- mersive Van Gogh, giant sunflowers and po-faced peasants emerge and disappear, projected overhead and underfoot in a cavernous industrial space. In New Mexico’s interactive mecca, Meow Wolf, the large-scale installations invite visi- tors to climb through walls, stroke tactile surfaces or create sounds. And in experimental pop-ups such as Dallas’ Sweet Tooth Hotel, visitors use the surrounding works as colorful backdrops to garner all the likes on Instagram. But how has this cultural shift become an unescapable trend? Dallas art leaders point to one name: Yayoi Kusama. Since the 1960s, the Japanese contemporary artist has been ex- perimenting with space and visual illusions. Her signature “infinity rooms” give viewers a chance to enter her work while merging with it via their own iPhone-captured images. “Kusama is the O.G. — the Meow Wolfs of the world would not exist if not for Kusama doing her crazy installations,” says local art- ist Will Heron, who serves as the artist liai- son for Meow Wolf’s newest outpost, opening in a former Bed, Bath and Beyond at Grapevine Mills in 2023. “Her work will still draw sold-out tickets because people want that experience,” Heron says. “It’s an influencer world we live in, so you see one person from your city who took this really cute picture [with a piece], then it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I need to go see that.’” “Kusama was a huge influence to us,” says Meow Wolf’s founder and director, Vince Kadlubek, who began the collective with friends as a series of pop-ups and has since expanded to permanent sites in Santa Fe, Denver and Las Vegas. “When we were starting, there was a 8 2 Kusama show at The Broad [Museum] in Los Angeles, a James Turrell [exhibition] at LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art], and [artist collective] teamLab at Pace Gallery, and all of these things were happening at the same time,” Kadlubek says. “Any museum that has an exhibition of Kusama’s work has record attendance because people want to experience an infinity mirror.” “She’s definitely the one who started setting off this big demand for immersive work,” says muralist and artist Mari- ell Guzman, who will create a room for Meow Wolf’s latest outpost. “People who would never go to museums started seeing images of this crazy infinity room and were like, ‘How do I get here?’” Dallas Museum of Art senior curator Anna Katherine Brodbeck, who worked on the institution’s Kusama block- buster exhibition All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pump- kins in 2017, says the rise of immersive work first started bubbling up as early as the mid-20th century. She cites phe- nomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s argu- ment that perception’s foundational role in the human experience is a precursor for the movement. “[It has to do] with how we experience our own body in space with relationship to art objects and engaging all of the senses,” Brodbeck says. “That’s what influenced people like Kusama. I’m really interested in how this comes from an art A scene from Lighthouse Immersive’s Immersive Van Gogh Michael Brosilow history perspective. People are interested in taking their own image inside these works, but the desire for the artist to create them rose independently.” Brodbeck also feels the yearning for visibility in our cur- rent culture is another reason for the movement’s success. As Kusama reclaimed her image through her work, so do mod- ern creatives, such as queer artists Alex Da Corte, whose neon and video work “Rubber Pencil Devil” was the centerpiece of the DMA’s For a Dreamer of Houses show last year. In fact, a desire for visibility drove Meow Wolf’s incep- tion in the first place. In 2008, Kadlubek and friends were a group of Santa Fe talents who didn’t fit the local gallery mode. To bridge the seemingly giant gap between the art market and artists, they created a series of pop-up spaces be- fore launching the permanent “House of Eternal Return” with the financial help of Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin in 2016. “There was a real energy towards breaking the mold and A lobby rendering of Meow Wolf’s Grapevine installation showcasing art in a way that was less about selling paintings and more about experiencing directly the power of art and creativity,” Kadlubek says of Meow Wolf’s genesis. “Immer- sive started to become the medium we wanted to express ourselves with. It felt the most playful to us as artists. We were into showing our work to kids and tapping into that part of ourselves and getting excited.” Meow Wolf walked so the Insta “mu- seum” could run. Major metropolitan areas can have as many as four or five of these expe- riences running at any given time. Dallas has its take on the phenomenon in the form of Jencey and Cole Keeton’s Sweet Tooth Hotel. Jencey Keeton says she was initially in- spired by immersive art when she worked at Fossil and the brand took over a room at Re- finery 29’s 29Rooms installation in New York in 2016. “In Dallas, that wasn’t happening,” she says. “I left Fossil and was working in real es- tate, which is one of the biggest investors in public art. I thought it would be really cool to bring an immersive experience here. I started talking with some of our friends who are art- ists and decided to just do one ourselves.” Initially opened in 2018 as a Victory Park pop-up, Sweet Tooth has since expanded to Watters Creek in Allen. Now the >> p10 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 SEPTEMBER 22–28, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com Mural design: Tsz Kam; Rendering: Gabriella Lovato Leger
