DENVER’S NEW CONVERGENCE STATION FROM MEOW WOLF IS A MIND-BENDING, SURREAL AND IMMERSIVE POP-CULTURE PHENOMENON.
Experience quantum travel at Meow Wolf’s third and most ambitious project to date. PHOTO BY KATE RUSSELL/COURTESY OF MEOW WOLF
WHEN CATIE KENNEDY wanted to create a texture to serve as a thematic backdrop to Numina, a sixth-dimensional ecosystem inside the Meow Wolf Convergence Station in Denver, she turned to hairless cats. “I wanted it to look like wood but flow like water,” says Kennedy, a Meow Wolf co-founder and creative director of Numina. “It’s like twisting saltwater taffy.” Working in concrete and rebar, artists used reference photos of hairless cats, mimicking the way their skin stretches and wrinkles over their bodies.
The catacombs are a blue maze of corridors inside the Ossuary. PHOTO BY KATE RUSSELL/COURTESY OF MEOW WOLF
Numina, with its 35-foot-high ceilings and colorful jellyfishlike creatures, is a monumental space that anchors the Convergence Station, a permanent art experience set inside a five-story, pizza-slice-shaped building tucked, not coincidentally, in a spaghetti-bowl convergence of highways at West Colfax and I-25. The building and installation took four years to construct and opened this fall. In just 24 hours, Meow Wolf, which is based in Santa Fe, N.M., sold 35,000 tickets.
When you travel through the Convergence Station, you’ll be immersed in a narrative built around a cosmic event that created a melding of disparate worlds. The exhibit offers travelers the chance to collect memories to solve mysteries by “booping” memory cards at RFID pads, discovering crystals from the planet Ossuary and punching codes into payphones set throughout the labyrinth exhibit. For clues, you can also chat up the creative operators, costumed characters who wander the Convergence Station.
Or you can simply move through the wildly creative selfie-friendly space and enjoy 79 unique art projects from 300 creatives, including 110 Colorado-based collaborators, from muralists and sculptors to fiber artists and technologists. There are spray-painted murals, 3D crocheted aliens and pianos that use electromagnets to play. The different spaces are connected by secret passages, including a 1960s RTD bus that serves as a tribute to the Gang of 19, a group of protesters who threw themselves in front of buses to fight for disability services in 1978. The bus is a wormhole to another time. 1338 1st St., Denver, meowwolf.com
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