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Transfix brings playa-inspired interactive art to Resort World Las Vegas

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Transfix at Resorts World
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A Seattle friend of mine visited Vegas recently and inquired about Transfix, the large-scale experiential art experience showing at Resorts World through September 16. “It’ll be nice to see some of that artwork again,” she texted. “I doubt I’ll go to TTITD again anytime soon, and [my husband] has never seen anything like it.”

“Oh, no doubt,” I replied, while surreptitiously looking up TTITD on Urban Dictionary: “Acronym for ‘That Thing in the Desert,’ aka Burning Man.”

I’ve never been to Burning Man. I have nothing against the idea of the weeklong festival, but visiting that “ecosystem of artists, makers and community organizers” would directly contradict my lifelong aversion to alkaline dust and chemical toilets. And thanks to Transfix, we don’t have to go to Black Rock City to see its epic-scaled, interactive artworks, because those candy-colored marvels have come to us.

Perusing Transfix’s 50-plus collected works is an unparalleled exercise in dreamlike distraction. You can’t turn a corner without seeing something incredible, whether it’s Christian Ristow’s enormous, grasping “Hand of Man,” Pablo González Vargas’ light-and-sound pillar “Ilumina” or Marco Cochrane’s serene, 45-foot-tall nude wire mesh figure “R-Evolution.” Nearly every piece invites the viewer to touch it, or at the very least, to pull up a cushion and simply stare at it, aptly transfixed.

But while this art exhibition has a few things in common with Burning Man—Transfix’s founder/CEO Michael Blatter and co-founder/chief revenue officer Tom Stinchfield met one another at the festival 10 years ago—its ambitions are bigger. Transfix aims to introduce the world to a new kind of art exhibition, one previously locked to festivals.

“Only about 50% of the art shown at Transfix has ever been shown at Burning Man. Fifty percent of it is just coming from different places all over the world,” Stinchfield says. “For us, it’s the fact that these creators are really building their art for art’s sake. It’s very different than what you might see in galleries or museums, or more mainstream art events like Frieze or Basel or Miami Art week.

“We always were kind of like, ‘This stuff should be experienced by more people’,” he continues. “It’s very difficult to get out to Burning Man or Coachella; it requires travel; it requires a lot of effort. We always felt that it was a shame that those barriers to entry were in place. So this idea really started as us wanting to get this work seen by more people.”

Transfix also fills a need for artists, Stinchfield adds. Once these pieces are completed and displayed—whether at Burning Man or a similar one-off gathering—their long-term prospects are limited; they can sit around waiting for another event, go to private collectors or simply vanish into storage. Transfix leases the art from the artist, maintains it and gets it seen by a massive audience, while freeing up space in the artist’s studio “to go and create more things,” Stinchfield says. “We’d love to help these artists to actually fund some of the works that they may have been dreaming of for years but just never had the means to create.”

That said, you can also explore Transfix for a solid hour and not think about any of this stuff—all on the Las Vegas Strip. You can twirl the interior-lit rhombic zonohedrons of Hybycozo studios’ “Point of View,” putting yourself at the center of a giant snowflake. You can sit inside Tyson Ayers’ “sound cave,” “5 Elements Tea House: Ether,” assembled from deconstructed pianos. Or you can lie underneath Christopher Schardt’s LED-illuminated spinning wheel “Paraluna,” watching it morph and melt and change.

“I’ll walk by and see some a family or a couple sitting there [watching “Paraluna”], and I’ll walk by an hour later and they’re still there, just watching,” Stinchfield says. “That speaks to the dynamic nature of Transfix, where there are these spaces to just kind of hang out. You could probably slip through and see a lot of things within an hour, an hour-and-a-half—or you can really take your time. It’s one of those things that you get out of it what you put into it. The more that you go exploring, the more that you will see.”

TRANSFIX Friday-Saturday, 7 p.m.-1 a.m.; Thursday & Sunday, 7 p.m.-midnight; $29-$59. Resorts World, transfixart.com.

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