WinkWorld Riyadh

Commissioned on impossibly short notice, Brendan designed, built, and installed an immersive art exhibit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia as part of Riyadh Season 2022. He assembled a team of artists and fabricators to execute the vision he developed with the client — and managed to produce a series of ambitious artworks in a compressed timeline, get them crated and shipped halfway around the world, then fly out to install them on site.

The exhibit was modeled after a traditional sideshow-mirror funhouse, using a hexagonal grid of equilateral-triangle mirrored prisms to disorient visitors and lead them through a surprising, overstimulating experience. The artworks included a large zoetrope, overhead kaleidoscopes, infinity mirror enclosures with addressable LED lighting, UV-reactive kinetic sculptures, helix columns, and plasma globes. The goal was to produce a genuinely psychedelic experience through purely optical and kinetic means — an interesting challenge in a country whose inhabitants are prohibited the usual routes to altered perception.

The entire exhibit was fabricated in New York, crated for international freight, and shipped to Riyadh for on-site installation.

Each kaleidoscope piece is a steel-and-glass enclosure — some triangular, some rectangular — with a mirrored chamber built into the top. Visitors peer into the opening and see themselves multiplied across infinite reflections, fractured and reassembled by the mirror geometry. DMX-controlled lighting inside each chamber shifts the visual effect in color and intensity.