Ready for The King’s Mouth?

This month a new immersive installation will be taking over part of our FLOAT bar + café area as the airplane departs for its next destination. Wayne Coyne’s acclaimed installation King's Mouth will be open to the public starting the morning of Friday, April 27th and be on-site for six months.

King's Mouth: A Unique Installation Experience

Coyne, front man of the Flaming Lips has used his incredible psychedelic-surrealist style to create this wildly immersive installation. The installation is an enormous metallic head. King's Mouth shines and reflects the colors and lights of the area around it. The head sits with it’s starkly colorful mouth wide open, inviting visitors to crawl inside of it. Once inside, visitors are able to lay back and relax as they experience beautiful cascading LED lights that have been synchronized to an exclusive Flaming Lips soundscape.

It’s a very exciting guest installation for us at Meow Wolf. The Flaming Lips have inspired installation art over the years through their use of popular music in a variety of dynamic storytelling environments.

The Deeper Story, Creating a Myth

To go with the installation, Coyne worked on a fantastic narrative component. He created a myth and origin story about King’s Mouth. The myth takes form over a series of drawings and multi-media collages that were made in hotel rooms, recording studios, and upon his own kitchen table. Like much of Coyne’s music, the King's Mouth myth reflects many of the same ideals. Ideals that look at psychedelic transcendence, but are rooted in humanity.

Many Meow Wolfers have their favorite Flaming Lips song but, one album in particular has barred an influence on a great majority of us. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, when it was released and in the years following, poured into Santa Fe and our collective imagination in a big way. We [Meow Wolfers & Santa Feans] dressed like pink robots for Halloween, we battled, we danced, and we had fun in ways we hadn’t explored before. This was a time before many of us were Meow Wolfers, but it was still a time when many of us shared thoughts, artworks, meals, and dreams for collaboration.

King's Mouth is finding a great temporary home in our lobby. We think if you like Meow Wolf’s style of immersive exploration, that you’re going to love this piece also.