from the pen of icarus blake

Far from the paintings in gilded frames of the Museum of Modern Art and the photographic artifice of the Museum of Illusions, Convergence Station stands as a white monolith between two highway overpasses.  I can rave about it all I want — you’ve heard the reviews yourself.  The immersive experience, the winding tunnels and secret rooms hidden behind coin machines and within refrigerators.  Meow Wolf installations are famous for putting you inside the painting, placing their patrons in direct contact with the art instead of separating them.  

Instead of considering the impact of media in a collage of newspaper clippings, you sit at a computer in an internet cafe built on the replication of a crowded city street and read the news for a different world while others take a walk in alt-Denver behind you.  You step into a surrealist painting of a forest, play the pipe music in a glass cathedral to strange gods, tumble into the secret rooms yourself as you explore on your own two feet.  Even the placement of Convergence Station is intentional, placing you in the center of everything so that you get the full impact of the separation as soon as you walk in.

Each room is a different artist, and you become the subject.  You are the residents walking the street, the worshippers in the church, the tired parent in the pizza parlor.  For the few hours you’re in Convergence Station, you are something else — a part of the place, and not separate from it — so that when you finally remove yourself from the fantasy they have created and step back out into the real world, you expect to find a hidden door around your next turn.  It takes some adapting to remember how to function in mundane reality.