29Rooms Announce Details for Dallas Exhibit
An immersive festival designed to drive vital conversations, inspiration, and positive change is heading to Dallas for its 2019 tour.
Refinery29, the leading digital media and entertainment company for young women, will be bringing its annual immersive festival ‘29Rooms: Expand Your Reality‘ to Dallas, from Aug. 8 to Aug. 9 at Gilley’s South Side Ballroom.
The 2019 tour will complement 29Rooms’ hugely popular marquee events in New York and Los Angeles, which have welcomed more than 100,000 visitors from around the world since the event series first launched in 2015.
The current iteration of the popular attraction invites you to Expand Your Reality in dozens of trippy themed rooms, unusual experiences, and an Art Park.
Here’s what we know:
- The Dallas event will bring together a diverse group of both local and national, emerging and established creatives and collaborators spanning the spectrum of art, entertainment, politics, and style.
- A new addition to the 2019 tour is The Art Park, which invited a local artist from each stop to transform a geometric playground into a canvas for creativity. Representing Dallas in the Art Park will be Dan Lam who is known for her colorful, otherworldly sculptures that draw viewers in for further exploration.
- Also new for the tour is The Traveling Billboard – a full-scale billboard mural by locally-based artists, welcoming guests to 29Rooms and highlighting talent from within each tour community. The Dallas billboard will be created by Denton-based artist and UNT professor Alicia Eggert, whose work focuses on the relationship between language, image, and time.
- Interactive artwork includes exhibitions like “29 Questions”, a social experiment where two strangers ask one another 29 questions; and “A Blind Date with Destiny,” a room where you “embark on a cosmic journey to unpack the mysteries of your fortune.” There’s also an array of rooms brought to you by partnerships with brands and companies like Bitten, Prudential, Transitions Lenses, SheaMoisture, Panera, and others.
- Tickets start at $34, and general admission includes a two-and-a-half-hour window in the colorful dreamscape. Tickets can be purchased at 29Rooms.com.
Eggert, who is known for her artistic creations with signs, many times neon and use of words in her art, said the work she created for the event is inspired by philosopher Plato.
Red flashing neon sign reading ‘never be’ and ‘forever become’, she said are intended to encourage people to embrace change.
Eggert has also designed an interactive art experience that will involve stacked cubes that will have people place stickers on certain cubes, and have the colorful stickers active the grids and reveal different messages.
“I am both a sculptor and a conceptual artist,” she said. “As a conceptual artist I work a lot with different ideas, and I use text as a way of communicating those ideas, in a clear and straightforward way.”
As a sculptor, Eggert believes in giving different artistic ideas a physical, tangible and three-dimensional form to understand it in a more intense way.
“I love the way signs can get our attention and communicate information, help us understand where we are in the world and what’s going on now, and it can often give us a glimpse of the bigger picture,” she said.
Eggert wants her art to encourage people to reflect on ideas or notice something they wouldn’t normally think about.
She said she’s really excited about the opportunity and supports the mission of refinery 29.
“The DFW area in general already has really amazing museums and exhibitions and a strong artistic community but it’s definitely receiving more recognition and exposure lately which it has really deserved for a while,” Eggert said.
