Unleash Your Inner Alice And Genuinely Immerse Yourself In Alexa Meade’s Fantastical ‘Wonderland Dreams’

“A dream is not reality but who’s to say which is which?” _ Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Meander through a maze of fluttering neon streamers and imagine yourself as a child who falls through a rabbit hole into a fantastical world of anthropomorphic creatures. The walls pulsate as mushrooms reveal hidden messages.

Grow curiouser and curiouser exploring a series of fantastical interconnected rooms, fully and lavishly hand-painted to evoke various scenes from Lewis Carroll’s beloved 1865 classic children’s tale, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Your perspective shifts quickly, as you navigate the capaciousness through a keyhole, larger-than-life thrones, and portals into your own capricious childlike fantasy.

Welcome to Alexa Meade’s Wonderland Dreams, presented in partnership with Catching Flights, which gained attention before the pandemic with its debut immersive experience Rosè Mansion. Open Wednesday through Sunday until April 2023, you can navigate the serpentine and Surreal world of Alice through some 30 rooms accessed via a rainbow mirrored staircase. Wander back upstairs to a themed café and wine bar after cosplaying your way around card deck palaces, mad tea parties, a New York City-inspired back alley, and pose through handheld picture frames in a living gallery.

Meade and her team of some 20 painting assistants devoted about two months to transform a shuttered Best Buy on Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan into a 26,000-square-foot truly immersive exhibit, using her trademark 3D painting style to create a 2D dreamscape.

“Me and my team worked around the clock, six days a week, going nonstop. We didn’t just paint the walls, we painted the floors and the ceilings. We painted all the furniture, the undersides of couches,” said Meade. “We painted thousands of individual set pieces. We painted clothes and costumes for guests, we painted cupcakes, giant mushrooms, life-size flamingoes, and playing cards.”

Meade planned the comprehensive project quickly but thoroughly, creating sketches, as well as a 78-page, single-spaced document capturing “all of my ideas that I wanted to execute. And this was written in paragraph form so these aren’t just a long list of bullet points, but really thought-out ideas,” she said. In the end, around three pages were incorporated into the stupendous space.

The fungible feel of the exhibit was born from “mood boards” Meade created to develop depth and scale, layering color palettes, textured brushstrokes, and a tactile array of custom fabrications.

Even before the pandemic, the art world began broadly re-imagining Surrealism for a new era. Planning in safer times for Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser to take over its Sainsbury Gallery as an immersive experience last year, the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) in London had no idea how much the real world would be turned on its head. The V&A explored the titular character’s journey through art and culture over 155 years in its multi-sensory exhibition incorporating stage costumes, haute couture, and music across genres.

Meade similarly invites her audiences to engage performatively, choosing from multitudes of props and hand-painted jackets, coats, and hats, that paint us into her canvas. It’s a dynamic work of art that evolves as we gasp and giggle into newly awakened consciousness.

We emerge from the pandemic with a renewed appreciation for Surrealism and fantastical art, which guided us through isolation by reconciling the reciprocal expanse between reality and the dream world. Surrealism endures, offering comfort and ebullience through our collective challenges and triumphs. Influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious, Surrealism is as relevant today as the urgent need for the dying practice of psychoanalysis. Surrealists straddled the worlds of reason and madness, objectivity and subjectivity.

A century after its debut, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland grew its appreciation among older readers who experimented with psychedelic drugs, forever imprinted on our collective consciousness through ubiquitous cultural touchstones such as Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 psychedelic anthem White Rabbit. Now widely touted as a treatment for myriad conditions such as major depressive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, severe depression, and opiate addiction, the global psychedelics market is forecast to grow into an $8 billion industry by 2029, according to a recent report from Data Bridge Market Research.

Meade takes on a timeless and timely task with Wonderland Dreams, embracing current trends, and giving us a genuine immersive experience. Projecting masterpieces on walls of cavernous interior spaces cannot compete with Meade’s original artwork enveloping us and drawing us into her creative imagination.

“In this exhibit, guests who step inside of the immersive exhibit get to embody the spirit of Alice and explore a world that is somewhere between art and reality and everything else in between,” Meade said. “The normal rules of logic melt away and you descend on a journey into the surreal, psychedelic, and downright magical otherworldliness.”

Though she doesn’t recall reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a child, Meade says she has fond memories of the 1951 animated musical fantasy comedy film Alice in Wonderland produced by Walt Disney Productions.

“I reread the book multiple times while (conceptualizing) Wonderland Dreams. The text is so rich and while it is written with a child audience in mind, it is absolutely spellbinding and captivating for any grown-up much less or even more so for an artist,” Meade joyfully recalled. “This exhibition first launched on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills in 2018. At that point, the title of the exhibit was Immersed in Wonderland. A lot of people who came to the first exhibit thought that it was Alice in Wonderland themed, in part because it was so surreal to be walking into a painting and to be exploring this 3D space as if it is a 2D world.”

The pandemic squelched plans for Immersed in Wonderland to travel to New York City in 2020, but the expanded iteration swiftly came to fruition.

Meade has focused primarily on portraiture over the past decade, “making humans my canvas,” she said. “For my living canvases, l oftentimes have a painted installation space where that person might be sitting on a painted chair in front of a painted wall and floor. For Wonderland Dreams, I’ve taken that to the next level. I didn’t just paint the walls and floors of the space, but everything inside the building.”

“While there are some art historical figures that inspire me, for the most part, I just find myself fascinated with light and shadow and the perception of space,” Meade explained. “I take more inspiration from science than I do (from) the canon of portraiture or painting as a medium. My style of art can be applied to practically any subject matter whether it is portraiture and painting on live models or creating still lifes.”

In the words of the English polymath who first welcomed us into this absurd world, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

Lucky for you, nearly any subway or MTA bus will take you to Wonderland Dreams. Buy tickets ahead of your visit.

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality.”