Read the fine print at Omega Mart
A strange grocery store is only the beginning. Follow the packages, painted glass and musical machinery to see what—and whose work—holds Omega Mart together.
Inside this guide
Plausible Deniability comes in a blue jug. There is a handle, a screw cap and a broad label: the reassuring shape of something that belongs beside a washing machine. The name is the problem. A few shelves away, a canister of Salt After Dark wears a red high heel. Grocery packaging has learned a second language.
At Omega Mart, Meow Wolf's art exhibition inside Las Vegas's AREA15 complex, reading the label is a good way to begin. The store gives you objects you already know how to approach, then makes their promises increasingly difficult to accept. Beyond the groceries are other rooms, other kinds of attention and a corporate story that visitors can investigate at their own pace.
The exhibition opened in February 2021. Its pleasures are easier to understand through a few of the things people made for it: a supermarket's worth of graphic design, a room drawn across layers of glass, musical machines and walls assembled from discarded objects. Give those things some time. There is more to look at here than the next doorway.
A very familiar sales pitch
The shelves borrow the visual grammar of a supermarket. Bottles repeat in rows. Brand colors separate one product from another. Cartons offer the brisk certainty of something that has already been tested, packaged and given a place in the household. Plausible Deniability is funny partly because its blue jug is so convincingly ordinary.
Meow Wolf's project credits describe more than 200 unique products developed by more than 50 artists and contributors. The work included concepts, package design, sourcing and coordination with vendors. That is a substantial production effort behind a seemingly effortless joke. The original credits record that effort; they are a good companion to the labels, rather than a current shopping list.
Emily Montoya, a Meow Wolf co-founder, was creative director of the grocery-store portion. Her remit included the physical space, commercials, branding and product development. A convincing package does several jobs at once: it can carry a joke, establish the store's voice and make an invented company seem capable of filling an entire aisle.
