great rooms

Surrealist Bunkers to Survive the Apocalypse

Doug Meyer’s show imagines a fantastical escape from future pandemics.

Photo: Mark Roskams, Courtsey Daniel Cooney Fine Art
Photo: Mark Roskams, Courtsey Daniel Cooney Fine Art

For his new exhibition, the artist Doug Meyer has imagined a world where people can indulge in escapist bunkers offering different experiences. He calls the show “Wyldlands,” and it is captivating not only for the strange beauty of its 15 sculptures but also for its prescient narrative, one that might have seemed preposterous a year and a half ago but is somehow eerily plausible after what we’ve been through since. Meyer presents us with a multimedia platform that fleshes out the infrastructure of how this strange new world operates showing us products and ephemera transporting us to the year 2037 where the wealthy isolate themselves from the ever-evolving pathogens of the day.

Meyer has designed every aspect of what we see including the platforms featuring the sculpture bunkers covered with fine powder sand. There’s even a Wyldlands handbook. It’s a fairytale nightmare of Meyer’s making that is actually the making of our own.

Meyer is a polymath designer — he has worked with his brother, Gene Meyer, on a line of rugs among other commercial and residential projects. He’s an artist and curator: His Heros Project and the book that followed, celebrated 50 creative talents we lost to the AIDS epidemic and traveled from New York to Miami and Los Angeles in 2016. His artwork probes the mysteries and possibilities through his own surreal lens of storytelling. He started work on this show at the onset of the lockdown, when fear and bewilderment was taking hold in a year no one could have imagined.

“It’s a cautionary tale,” he tells me. “I don’t find it far fetched at all. I think we could have taken this much further than we actually did.”

Meyer conceived of this as “the perfect spaces for the voyeur, exhibitionist or anyone seeking a meditative space.” The five garden rooms are separated by églomisé painted glass walls allowing for full and veiled space. Photo: Mark Roskams/Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art
“The walls and floor are sheathed in silver reflective foil. Two enormous tinted windows on either side (of the fish head) allow for optimal views allowing for both the voyeur and exhibitionist to experience the room” according to Meyer. Photo: Mark Roskams/Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art
The Cactus room is the space inside the Howard Roark bunker. One of the earliest bunkers built. This space was designed for meditation and staring. The enormous sculpture is inspired by the Saguaro cactus which are abundant throughout the Wyldlands property. Saguaros can reach a height of 45’ tall. The room is lit by 6 large windows in various shapes and of various colors, which create the beautiful cast of green and teal within the space, the colors change in the room as the light outside changes. Photo: Mark Roskams/Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art
A partial view of the installation. Photo: Mark Roskams/Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.
A partial view of the installation. Photo: Mark Roskams/Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art.
Meyer at the show. Photo: Mark Roskams/Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art; Wendy Goodman (Meyer).
Meyer at the show. Photo: Mark Roskams/Courtesy of Daniel Cooney Fine Art; Wendy Goodman (Meyer).
Surrealist Bunkers to Survive the Apocalypse