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By layering light, sound, texture, and narrative to create an all-encompassing Maximalist space, our exhibitions invite nonlinear exploration and awakens a sense of wonder that lives between the beautiful and the sublime.
The Amalgam, Creative Directors: Dani Herrera, Mat Crimmins, Photographer: Atlas Media.
There’s a common misconception that Maximalism is simply the idea that “more is more.” While that phrase makes for a funky thrifting mantra, it doesn’t quite capture the intentionality behind maximalism. The aesthetic isn’t just cramming as many things as you can in a space, and it’s not consumerism running wild and buying everything that delights your eye, even if we wish it was the latter.
At its core, Maximalism is about identity and emotion. It says surround yourself with what makes you feel: color, texture, found objects, family heirlooms, or even gaudy tchotchkes from who-remembers-where. Crucially, it’s not about more for the sake of more, it’s about more as a medium. It’s about bringing what may seem like discordant items together to create a carefully constructed space that embraces contradiction and contrast (and a dash of chaos) — a space that fully activates your senses.
At Meow Wolf, we take the principles of Maximalism as a visual aesthetic and push those boundaries a few steps farther. For our exhibitions, it’s not just the layering of visual components - it’s layered sound, scent, textures, light, and narrative elements, on top of these myriad visual components.
Stepping into one of our exhibitions is stepping into a maximalist world carefully designed to stimulate every part of your brain. Color and pattern clash and cohere. Music pulses through the floor. Lighting shifts as you move. Even the scent might change as you walk from one corner of the multiverse to another.
Our spaces aren’t built around a single focal point. Instead, stories unfurl in layers. There’s no one path through them, no single narrative. Every object, texture, or corner might hold a clue. Maximalism allows for that non-linear exploration. Every sensory detail contributes to a feeling of being in the world rather than simply looking at it.
And our maximalism doesn’t stop at aesthetics—it’s also a technical symphony. Projection mapping, interactive displays, sound design, scent machines, and lighting effects all build on each other, encouraging visitors to pause, peer, listen, and wander.
Lamp Shop Alley is visual density incarnate, commercialism gone rogue. Storefronts overflow with curios, nonsense objects, neon signs, and tongue-in-cheek jokes with ads for dreamlike products layered on top of each other. It’s a capitalist fever dream of meaning and absurdity entangled.
In this layering of information and design, our Maximalism starts to bridge the philosophical gap between the beautiful and the sublime (told you we’d come back to that bad joke). This space is beautiful in the content that makes up its absurdity, though it begins to enter the sublime in its overload of that absurdity.
Let’s get a little philosophical (but not too much – this isn’t your undergrad seminar). In Kant’s Critique of Judgement, his discussions of the “agreeable” and the “good” are relatively straightforward. You think that a cashmere blanket is soft? That’s pure sensory judgment of the “agreeable”. You think shoveling snow off your neighbors sidewalk when you shovel yours is the nice thing to do? That’s the morally ethical judgement of the “good”.
But the last two judgements? The “beauty” and the “sublime” - that’s where things get interesting and a bit more complicated. “Beauty” is harmonious. It makes you feel pleasure, joy, delight. It’s a sunset that makes you stop to take a photo.The “sublime”, on the other hand, is overwhelming. It’s awe with a hint of terror. It’s standing on the edge of a cliff and looking down. It’s a space so overwhelming, it dissolves your sense of scale. And somehow, it still leaves you gasping with joy.
Maximalism at Meow Wolf lives between these two. It’s the portal where the beautiful meets the sublime. It overwhelms you, but in doing so transports you.
No matter which portal you use to enter the space, you’re immediately confronted with a vortex of objects suspended mid-spin in defiance of gravity and logic. Lights pulse, time expands and contracts. Here, we play with scale – another tenet of the sublime. Against the monumental scale of Amalgam, you feel small, suspended, unsure – but it also feels electric and completely enthralled.
After that immediate moment of overwhelm, you’re drawn into the world you’ve landed in. Your eye tracks every inch of the space, always finding something new to look at. The Amalgam disorients you, but in doing so encourages you to keep exploring. And as you keep exploring you realize that the more you look, the more you find…
All of our spaces utilize maximalism to encourage you to explore. They disorient you, then transport you, and then guide you down the myriad paths within the universe you’ve entered. Numina uses its sheer scale and the physical layering of pathways (across multiple heights and degrees of visibility) to guide your journey without the confines of a single path or designated order of exploration. Nothing in Numina exists in a straight line: time folds, colors shift, surfaces seem to breathe. It’s beautiful, and being surrounded by that otherworldly beauty creates that tension of the sublime as you’re confronted at every turn by the unknown. And as you make sense of the world, you begin to understand the non-linear path(s) that have been laid out before you.
Excess, when used intentionally, creates possibility. It awakens parts of us that crave wonder, pattern, memory, scale, and meaning. It overwhelms us to wake us up. And that's the trick of our maximalist spaces: you lose yourself, and then you find yourself again. When maximalism is done right, it’s not just decoration. It’s transformation.
“The Sublime is not, strictly speaking, something which is proven or demonstrated, but a marvel, which seizes one, strikes one, and makes one feel”
- Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, French Poet & Critic
