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Everything Is Terrible! talks VHS tapes, fake history, and knitting for Meow Wolf’s newest exhibition in Los Angeles.
Photo provided by Everything Is Terrible!
Transcribed by Rivka Yeker
We have another artist announced in our winding road to Meow Wolf Los Angeles, and this artist collective is an old friend of ours. From Sushi the Dragon at House of Eternal Return and Pizza Pals Playzone in Convergence Station, to knitting and making worm skies for our newest home, we’re excited to again work with the creative minds at Everything Is Terrible! Our artist liaison, AJ Girard, chatted with Nicky Maier and Dimitri Samakis from the Everything Is Terrible! collective on their working studio in Los Angeles, how they’ve amassed so many VHS tapes, and how living in the city impacts their creativity:
AJ: I’m excited because I know of you all, but I don’t know as much about you all. I did get to see the project in Denver’s Convergence Station. Who are you, and what mediums do you work with, for our readers’ knowledge?
Nic: Who am I? I don’t know who I am anymore. Everything Is Terrible! We’ve been around almost 20 years, so we’ve done so many different things. We started as a found-footage VHS chop shop, taking old footage and re-editing it into psychedelic videos for the internet. For the blog.
Dimitri: Technically started as a blog.
Nic: Yeah. Then we started making features. Then we started touring with those features, and the tours got more elaborate. We started building bigger costumes and puppets. That’s kind of where it shot off. From there, I did more costume stuff while Dimitri did more design, and then we’d always come together to edit and make the movies. The installations kind of shot off from that, mostly out of our Jerry Maguire VHS collection. That was the beginning of our installation work. And that coincided with our relationship with Meow Wolf, which obviously elevated the game quite a bit.
Dimitri: I think what Nic and I do best is that we overlap a bunch, but we also go in very separate directions. It’s as much analog as digital; there’s so much of everything. It could be illustration and design on my end, or full-on costumes. World-building has been a big part of what we’ve been doing for the last 20 years, especially the last 10.
AJ: I’m gonna veer from the questions for a second. I’m curious, as a new friend - how do you build the archive? You mentioned Jerry Maguire. Is it personal? Do your personalities show up in what you collect? I’m kind of doing that too. It feels like the early internet, saving things you want to revisit. How do you determine what stays?
Dimitri: With Jerry Maguire, that started as a joke. We were collecting tapes individually - EIT started as a collective, so people would post whenever they wanted. We all shared a love of scavenging for VHS in the early days. There was nothing “cool” about collecting Jerry Maguire. It’s the least cool thing ever. It’s just the sheer mass of it. Thanks to our fans, we’ve mostly stopped collecting on our own - they send them to us. But in general, yeah, sourcing from thrift stores, estate sales, wherever.
AJ: I find that when I bring stuff home and put it next to other things I’ve collected, my actual interests show up more clearly.
Nic: 100%. And we all have different personalities with it. That’s one of the funnest parts. I’ll look at another member’s finds and be like, “I never would’ve grabbed any of this.” But if we bring it home, it ends up in the pit. There’s always a nugget in there that comes back in an edit.
Dimitri: The internet made nothing rare anymore, which is great, but it made the hunt different. We started looking for the most boring tapes imaginable.
Nic: Give a normal person a camera and where they go with it is way more fascinating. The more money you have, the more Jerry Maguire it becomes.
Dimitri: Home videos are the hardest to find and pound-for-pound the best. Wedding tapes, raw family footage - that’s the purest thing.
AJ: I love that. I was at an estate sale and someone told me: for everything you’re attracted to, try to find something you’re resisting. Figure out why. Sometimes when I stop thinking and just feel it, it makes me feel childlike… free.
Nic: Repulsion is a huge part of our work. We’re often attracted to things for the “wrong” reasons or at least strong emotional reasons. I was reading reviews on IMDb the other day… people being so mad about our movies. And I love that. Get mad. That rules.
AJ: Tell us about your studio space.
Nic: I mostly work out of our studio in unincorporated East LA, where you came through. That’s where part of the VHS collection lives. Costumes, rehearsals, fabrication - it’s all there. We were in Chinatown, but we’ve been in this area almost ten years.
Dimitri: I’ve been lucky to have my own space too. Having your own stations, even if it’s small, is everything. Music here. Glitch art there. Drawing upstairs. Just bouncing between things. It’s cheesy, but we feel lucky. We had to build this ourselves. No one was going to do it for us. For Meow Wolf LA, world-building is huge. We’re building 40–50 years of fake history into about 700 square feet. That means everything – knitting, beat-making, video games, sculpture, dioramas, film.
Nic: Historically, Dimitri would draw a character and I’d build it. Now we’re inverting it. I’ll build costumes from nothing, and those influence the design. We’re pulling in Anna, Anna’s mom knitting, Dimitri’s wife Suki making a worm sky. It’s an intuitive folk-art universe.
AJ: To talk about LA more broadly, how does the city feed you artistically?
Nic: People have ideas about LA, but when you live here, it’s a working-class city full of real people. That influences everything. At the same time, there’s corporate propaganda art being produced here. That feedback loop — real culture and manufactured culture — is inspiring.
Dimitri: We don’t just get inspired by museums. Nic bikes everywhere. I walk and take transit. We see hand-painted auto shop signs, mom-and-pop restaurant murals. Just someone making a sign because they need a sign. That’s beautiful. It’s folk art and I don’t mean that in a bad way.
AJ: I resonate with that. I loved how your studio blended into the neighborhood. If you were guiding someone through LA, where would you take them?
Dimitri: Go to your friends’ studios. Even if it’s their bedroom. That’s inspiring. Also, estate sales. Seeing how someone lived, that’s beautiful. Some quick spots I love: Nick’s Diner, Pat & Lorraine’s, The Horseless Carriage, Pinocchio, The Prince, Evil Cooks, Dai Kuya, Tacos Baja, Diorama Museum of the Bhagavad Gita, The Bonaventure lobby, and Whammy Analog Media.
Nic: I don’t go into buildings to eat anymore. I eat on the street. Tacos A Cabron by our studio - you’re not going inside, and there’s a swear word in the name.
Catch the latest work from Everything Is Terrible! when Meow Wolf opens its doors in Los Angeles. Their surreal touch will be part of the unfolding story, and we can’t wait for you to experience it in person. Sign up for our emails to be the first to hear more artist announcements on the road to Meow Wolf Los Angeles.
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