Neon Dream was a unique, immersive black light experience that first debuted at HUBweek in 2017. Drawing inspiration from all that glows in the natural world and elements of interior design, Neon Dream was the ultimate fluorescent clubhouse. Black lights turned a 20’ shipping container into a strange, hyper-colorized environment where you could enjoy hand silkscreened wallpaper, an infinity mirror fireplace, a TV turned scorpion terrarium, a glowing geode cave and a cut paper “living” wall.
Neon Dream was a collaboration between five artists: Helen Popinchalk & Morgan Grenier of Trifecta Editions, Jay LaCouture of AntiDesigns, Andy Bablo of Steez Design and Cyrille Conan.
About the “living” wall…
Our living wall started out as a faux foliage cover for a chain-link fence. To this grid, we added hundreds of hand silkscreened, hand cut paper leaves as well as a few neon-ized fake flowers, palms and ferns for some texture. There was lots to discover if you looked closely: birds, nests and eggs, lizards, frogs, butterflies and more!
About the geode corner…
Our geode cave was made from paper; each crystal started as a flat, silkscreened template. These geometric designs were cut, scored, folded and glued together then attached to fabric. We finished them with a little fluorescent spray paint to make them pop.
About the animal prints, wallpaper, TV terrarium and infinity mirror fireplace:
Our wall paper and animal prints were created by Jay LaCouture. His prints started as pencil drawings in his sketch book. The drawings were digitized, color-separated and re-created as multi-colored silkscreen prints. His repeat pattern wallpaper was all screen printed by hand using neon inks, then wheat pasted to the paneling we installed in the shipping container.
Our terrarium, home to Frank “Spartacus” the Scorpion (R.I.P. Frankie!) was a repurposed vintage television set. All scorpions, including our Asian forest scorpion, naturally fluoresce under black light. To create his terrarium, Andy Bablo gutted the TV, replaced its glass front with a piece of flexible acrylic, painted the exterior to match our shipping container and installed LED black lights. No terrarium is complete without some plastic neon plants but Frank even had his own mini shipping container and TV! The jungle sounds you could hear were playing through the TV’s original speaker. Frank ate two crickets a week and drank water from a small sponge. He enjoyed the warmth from both a heat lamp and a heating mat underneath the coconut fibers on the bottom of his tank.
Using a fully reflective mirror surrounded by LED strip lighting and a partially transparent one-way mirror placed a short distance in front of it, our fireplace appeared to recede into infinity. The fireplace contained birch logs growing hand-sculpted clay mushrooms and a fake neon orange newt.
In 2018, Neon Dream returned to HUBweek with the Crystal Cave. Black lights and yards of black treated fabric transformed an 8’ x 20’ shipping container into a strange cavern where visitors were delighted by walls of crystals hiding druzy skeletons, a cave ceiling home to phosphorescent glowworms, a family of bats and neon crawlers. Stalactites and stalagmites revealed deep grottos using infinity mirrors and hidey holes revealed a multitude of imaginative surprises - when viewers peeked in, they discovered radiant fish and a glowing ant colony… and so much more! Crystal Cave engaged all the senses with special soundscapes, smells and even atmospheric shifts (nighttime fog machines!) Everything in our environment was hand-crafted - Meow Wolf meets Planet Earth - a surreal, saturated, visual feast celebrating art and the beauty & wonder of the natural world.
