You might not immediately recognize Chris Wink’s name or face, but you know his hue. A co-founder (with Matt Goldman and Phil Stanton) of Blue Man Group, Wink has been steadily expanding Las Vegas’ feel for the surreal since BMG arrived at the Luxor in 1997.

Though Wink stepped away from the BMG organization in 2017, he’s not done bringing the unexpected to our city’s entertainment scene. As Area15’s Director of Content and Cool Sh*t, he’s bringing all his theatrical know-how to that entertainment, dining, retail and experience complex. With Area15’s Wink World: Portals Into the Infinite, a gallery of strikingly kinetic infinity rooms, Wink has widened his palette to include every point of the color spectrum. He spoke to the Weekly about the liberating feeling he gets from working with Area15, and what it takes to corner the Slinky market.

What convinced you it was time to step away from Blue Man Group?Was it just time to go? Yeah, and looking back, it was such a good choice. For many years I woke up every day thinking I had the best job in the world. But it got to a point where I was in a bit of a rut—I kept repeating myself. I had a desire to keep the organization going: How do we market it? And I looked at myself and said, “When did I stop being an artist and become a corporate guy? I gotta get out of here.”

So, I started working on Wink World on my own. I went from having this whole organization at my disposal to just myself and my trusty tech guy, down in my living room. And when [Area15 Chief Creative Officer] Michael Beneville invited me to meet [Chief Executive Officer] Winston Fisher and see what they were up to, I was like, “Oh, man, this feels like the old days.”

I got into this amazing situation where I got my little playground, and a bigger playground, too. I love collaborating with large teams, and that’s my job as Area15’s Director of Cool Sh*t. But I also like having [Wink World], where I really feel like an artist. I can make choices based on my own stupid impulses. I mean, for this I bought all the neon translucent Slinkys in North America.

During COVID-induced shortages, no less. That’s a real accomplishment. I had it cornered! I’m quite confident that I got all of them.

I don’t want to tell readers too much about Wink World; it needs to be experienced firsthand. But can you say a bit about how you conceived it?I was playing in my bathroom. I’d put some black lights in there … and I happened to have a couple of bags of leftover toys from one of my kids’ birthday parties—cheap Slinkys, things that glow. I started hanging them obsessively from the ceiling, and then I got some mirrors and put them on the wall. … [I’m not] like those people who can see a finished result in their brain, like a painter or architect. My process is iterative, and it’s based on play. I was literally playing. I tried this, I tried that, and it just kept going until it spilled out into my living room. Then I got a little bit of help and motorized the Slinkys. I just gave myself permission to follow this muse, follow this game to wherever. And it just didn’t stop.

It really doesn’t. You get completely lost in Wink World’s pieces. That’s the thing about every infinity room I’ve been in… The only thing I didn’t like about the Yayoi Kusama exhibit that I went to is that there was me all over it. I was reflecting in the mirror; I was in the way. And I wanted to see her stuff! In some ways, the infinity mirror experience is almost a psychedelic experience. It’s not psychedelic in that you feel like you’re on drugs necessarily, but it’s psychedelic in the sense that you can have an experience of flipping from kind of an ego or a self-conscious presence to sort of the opposite of that.

Any kind of mirror increases your self-consciousness: There I am, oh, my God. But the funny thing about an infinity mirror room is that you have the opposite feeling. You can’t pay attention to yourself, because you’re repeated and there’s other patterns and you just become kind of color in this long fractal. But at the same time, I do get a little frustrated when I want to look around. … [Wink World uses] two-way mirrors, so instead of seeing yourself, except in the few times when I want you to see yourself, you sort of get out of the way.

The Strip’s take on art has evolved over the years, from paintings hung in low-traffic casino hallways to the huge reception that greeted Yayoi Kusama’s Bellagio exhibition in 2019. Could something as art-focused as Area15 have existed in Vegas’ tourist corridor 20 years ago? I couldn’t even see Blue Man going to Vegas 20 years ago. When we came in, we said, “This is either going to be the worst idea ever or it’s going to be really interesting.” And the fact that we weren’t like everything else made it interesting for people. People really do have a desire to see something new.

Another difference between then and now is that many of the Blue Man and Cirque employees are residents. Here we are in a pandemic, Area15 opens, and it’s basically the locals coming in. There’s a giant community here of people that either are in the arts or value the arts. I’m thinking that it’s actually lucky for us that Wink World and Area15 have opened without many tourists in town. We’re developing a relationship with this very diverse, very sophisticated community. They’re hungry to try things; they’re curious. It’s very exciting.

WINK WORLD: Portals Into the Infinite Monday-Thursday, 3-10 p.m.; Friday, 3 p.m.-midnight; Saturday, 10 a.m.-midnight; Sunday, 10 a.m.-10 p.m.; $20. Area15, 3215 S. Rancho Drive, winkworld.com.