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Rare are the places where you can truly vanish, where you can disappear into imagination and wonder and lose all track of time. Rarer still the places where you’re not only allowed to touch, to interact, to feel, to experience, but actually encouraged to do so. Touch this, crawl through this, investigate this, believe that, uncover the mystery. This is what we found when our dear friend’s Baylee and Mady told us to meet them in the heart of Denver at a “museum” they said was called Meow Wolf.
Halloween is right around the corner, only 4 days away, and I think it’s always been my favorite holiday for a few reasons. First, if you’ve been around this place for anything longer than a month or two you’ll already know: Autumn is my absolute favorite season, and I long for it all year long when out of it. Clearly this has a pull to my heart, linking Halloween and the season of changing leaves and crisp nostalgic air in an intrinsic and inextricable way, but it’s something else, it’s something more. Halloween is the time of make believe, it’s the time of imagination, of everyone dressing up in costumes, pretending to be something else if only for a night. It’s the holiday of thinner veils, of a feeling so thick you can breathe it, and I think it’s always been this that draws me to it.
Meow Wolf, it turns out, made me feel the exact same way.
If you’ve never been, if you were like me and have never heard of it, Meow Wolf, according to their own About Us says this:
“Meow Wolf started in 2008 as a small collective of Santa Fe artists sharing an interest in publicly displaying their works and developing their skills together. This collaborative approach blossomed into Meow Wolf's distinctive style of immersive, maximalist environments that encourage audience-driven experiences.”
Maximalist is an understatement my friends, as the Denver installation is absolutely massive. I’m saying 90,000 square feet of completely, fully, entirely immersive art. Every room is another universe, every secret doorway leads to a fully realized world, every single thing your eyes see, your hands touch, is real, is lived in, and looks like it’s been there forever. If you combined your strangest dreams, Guardians of the Galaxy sets, and the world of The Fifth Element and Doctor Who’s far-off planets, you might be somewhere close. Everywhere you go, everything you touch or open, every old phone you dial, all goes somewhere, all leads to something.
There are alien creatures, there are texture-scapes that are impossible, there are glowing slime globs on the walls that softly groan and change color when you touch them, there are portals that lead to portals that lead to strange planets with ten thousand thousand little details. Everywhere, art. Everywhere, imagination.
Inside this, there are strange little glowing lights that urge you to “Boop” them with a card you're assigned at the start of the journey. Every boop unlocks another memory, every memory you must combine to uncover the mystery of what happened to these worlds, what led them to converging, what led to the disappearance of some of the most important people involved. So you go, so you wander, so you explore and uncover and boop things and your mind gets lost inside the enigma.
You disappear into it.
After two hours of being lost in this strange riddle, an epiphany dawned on me, and hit me like a ton of bricks:
Art is vital.
Places like this are vital, places that allow the complete and total disconnect from anything we know as reality. This was more than Disneyland theatrics and rides that encourage you to spend more money to wait in shorter lines, this was a vanishing into a world that was created to show art, to make art, to facilitate the willingness to just play, just imagine, and stop worrying so much about the world around us.
How wonderful to, for even a few hours, forget about the drama and the bullshit of Our world. To immerse yourself into some strange mystery that is surrounded by, consumed by, the idea of memory and its importance. To try to help uncover it, discover it, re-cover it so that the world it belonged to doesn’t lose it forever. For what becomes of a society, of culture, if the memory of it fades?
What makes Meow Wolf even more powerful, is its use of broken things to fill the world. To recycle materials cast aside and thrown away, and with them the memories they also helped create and anchored themselves to, is to do more than just recycle the actual material and keep it from landfills. It’s to give their memories a second chance, another opportunity to create new memories with their inclusion. What a beautiful, beautiful thing.
We can take what they call broken, something we knew, we still know, and make it into something so much more, so much richer, so much more magic and beautiful.
Art matters. This matters. It is absolutely magical to get lost somewhere like this, to allow yourself the unbelievably vital permission to disappear into wonder. To allow all the current shit we’re worrying about, carrying, and losing sleep over, to vanish, to drift off, even if it’s only for a few hours.
We returned to Meow Wolf a little under a month later, this time bringing Henry and Addie with us, and wondered how two teenagers of a generation that is so categorically different than our own, would react. Would they too get lost? Would they find it the worst of all insults—cringey?
They did get lost, they did Not find it anything other than magnificent. Watching them get lost, as we got lost, was a triumph of proof that these places matter. A place where two 40-somethings can feel like 8 year olds, and two teenagers that act like 40 year olds, can do the same.
For a few hours we all got lost, together, and it’s something we won’t ever forget.
Turns out, there are quite a few more Meow Wolf installations, scattered about the United States, and each has a completely different feel, world, environment, and set of mysteries. I’ll be damned if we’re not going to go looking for them, if we’re not going to try to solve them.
After all, this is what we seek.
A place to vanish,
disappear into wonder.
This is what we seek.
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