Meow Wolf's upcoming Los Angeles location, set to open later this year in a former Cinemark movie theater in West L.A., will feature a 20-foot-tall, 1,000-pound amoeba-like creature named WoWoW, created by the L.A.-based multimedia collective Everything Is Terrible. WoWoW serves as the centerpiece of "the N.E.S.T.," an EIT-designed section of the 26,000-square-foot immersive exhibition space that tells the story of the Noothies, a fictional community of former film workers who discover a god and a hidden truth about reality. The installation pays tribute to maximalist roadside attractions like Wisconsin's House on the Rock and New Mexico's Tinkertown Museum, and is one of 45 installations by local collaborating artists including Gabriela Ruiz and David Altmejd.
This collaboration matters because it marks Meow Wolf's fifth outpost and its first in Los Angeles, expanding the Santa Fe-based immersive art company's reach into a major cultural hub. The partnership between Meow Wolf and Everything Is Terrible, which began in 2009, represents a continued evolution of interactive, handmade art experiences that challenge traditional boundaries between entertainment and fine art. The installation also highlights the tension between Hollywood's commercial machinery and the desire to create art for art's sake, a theme central to Everything Is Terrible's nearly 20-year history of using thrifted VHS tapes and found footage to create viral, psychedelic works.