Feeling the Burn: A Metaphoenix rises in the desert

The Metaphoenix is rising on a recent afternoon as hot as the flames it’ll spew soon enough.

Well, sort of: It’s leaving the garage, at least.

The thing rumbles to life in a North Las Vegas warehouse soundtracked by the discordant screech of metal cutting into metal and scented with the distinct tang of burning grinder dust.

“All clear to the left! All clear to the right!” bellows one of the eight workers here today, most of them smudged with grease, all of them slicked with sweat.

And with that, the 40-foot-long “mutant vehicle” — a school bus in a past life, before it sprouted metal wings — slowly lumbers into the daylight like a giant, mechanized, party-friendly bear leaving its cave upon hibernation’s end.

Today’s a big day.

“This is the first time we’re attempting to put the head on,” explains Kevin Bracken, project lead for Metaphoenix, eyeing the bird-shaped sculpture that’ll top the vehicle in question. “It’s a momentous occasion.”

About that head: It’s nearly 10 feet tall and shoots fire.

Once in place, Metaphoenix will be nearly complete.

Then, after another week of fine-tuning, it’ll begin the nearly 400-mile trek north to Black Rock City, home to Burning Man, the eight-day, communal art and music gathering that’s intended to be the apotheosis of radical self-expression, where Metaphoenix will make its public debut among hundreds of other rides of its kind synonymous with the event. (A mutant vehicle is essentially a more elaborate art car that has been highly modified from its original form).

It’ll be among the biggest, most intricately designed vehicles of its kind to ever come from these parts.

It took a team of nearly 50 people over a year to construct, a mix of locals and out-of-towners, many of them from Canada, where Bracken and his wife, Metaphoenix Creative Director Marie Poliak, lived before relocating to Vegas two years ago.

For those who’ve toiled on this outsize creation for the past 14 months, some logging eight-hour shifts after doing the same at their day jobs, the Metaphoenix represents something more than a fairly spectacular means of helping to light up an otherwise barren stretch of northwestern Nevada desert for a week, when Burning Man takes place from Sunday to Sept. 5 this year.

“The genesis of the idea was the pandemic, how everything came to a halt,” Poliak noted a week earlier from the warehouse office, the lone source of air conditioning in this otherwise sweltering workshop. “We wanted to represent something that is a rebirth of the arts.”

Bracken elaborates.

“The phoenix is also very much a story of Las Vegas,” he says. “At the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t know the shape of it at the time, and a lot of people counted Vegas out, ‘It’s only a one-industry town, will it really be able to survive this pandemic?’ The answer is obviously, ‘yes.’ ”

Many things were lost during the pandemic — lives and livelihoods most significantly, but also numerous avenues for artistic expression and the outlets for experiencing them, the rocket fuel of the imagination.

For this bunch, it’s now about attempting to gain a little something back.

Or not so little.

A Burning desire

Kevin Bracken was 11 years old when he first started asking his mother to take him to Burning Man.

And as moms tend to do when their pre-teen sons desire to travel 2,700 miles across the country from their native New York City to spend a week in a fire-festooned fantasia of human petting zoos and nude welcoming committees, she declined.

Annually.

Bracken was initially drawn to Burning Man by the music — he’s long been into the rave scene, which began outside traditional venues and clubs, its events taking place in unregulated spots like abandoned warehouses and beneath bridges. He dug the idea of an egalitarian, decentralized music experience with no gatekeepers.

Finally in 2006, when he was in college double majoring in urban sociology and political science, Bracken was able to make the trek to Burning Man for the first time with his then-girlfriend. They borrowed a tent and subsisted on apples and granola bars to afford the trip.

Bracken’s gone every year since; Poliak began attending in 2011, when the two started dating.

Around 2015, they got the urge to engineer a mutant car of their own. They didn’t really know what they were doing at the time, but they did it anyway.

“In the beginning, it was just a hope and a prayer,” Bracken recalls. “That was really a lot of learning by doing.”

Their first car, the luminous The Prodigal Swan, was built by a team of 10 and appeared at fests including Burning Man, Life is Beautiful and the Electric Daisy Carnival.

Poliak, a graphic artist, conceptualized and developed the designs for the vehicle; Bracken helped coordinate its creation, recruiting volunteers among friends and fellow artists.

“It’s kind of my job to put the people and the tools and the space together,” he says.

Next, came a larger, more involved vehicle, the dragon-shaped Heavy Meta, which was showcased at over 30 events across the country.

The crew helped finance the art cars by throwing elaborate fundraising parties in Toronto, where Bracken and Poliak lived at the time.

They also made money by selling The Prodigal Swan to Corner Bar Management founder Ryan Doherty, whose Vegas properties include downtown nightspots and restaurants like Commonwealth, Peyote and Lucky Day and who sometimes displays the piece outside his bar Park on Fremont.

The Vegas connections don’t end there: In 2013, Bracken and Poliak took a meeting with late Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, who hipped them to his plans for reimagining downtown.

Years later when they decided to leave Canada, they remembered Hsieh’s words.

“We kind of made a short list of cities that we would live in,” Bracken recalls, “and because of the experience we had in meeting Tony and learning about the Downtown Project and the really cool things that are happening here and the Arts District, it was pretty obvious where we wanted to go.”

They relocated to a place in the Huntridge neighborhood on Dec. 1, 2020, three days after Hsieh died after being severely burned in a Connecticut house fire.

Seven months later, in a friend’s garage, work began on their biggest project yet.

From bus to (metal) bird

“It’s like origami — with steel.”

Brad Allen’s explaining how a flat stack of metal gets transformed into a massive bird head tall as a basketball hoop.

As Metaphoenix’s flame effects guru can attest, it’s an elaborate, highly exacting process posited on precision, with less margin for error than a surgeon extracting one of your kidneys.

The process began with an artist in Toronto creating a 3D model of Metaphoenix’s head, which was sent to an engineer in Ukraine to put in a 3D laser cutting file. A Vegas shop, Precision Tube Laser, then made the cuts in the various sheets of metal. Afterward, each sheet had to be bent into shape within 0.1 degree of the required angle for the sculpture.

Finally, an engineer from Vancouver flew down to weld everything in place.

All told, it took seven people just to construct the head.

Metaphoenix is being built on a scale this crew has never attempted before, over a year in the making with a projected capacity of 100 people.

By comparison, The Prodigal Swan held just six passengers; the 30-foot long Heavy Meta was considerably larger, but still assembled in just four months.

With the Metaphoenix, it took two months to remove all the seats and tear down the inside of the bus that it’s fashioned from — and which they bought in Phoenix, fittingly enough.

“Ever try to take a bus apart?” Poliak asks. “They’re not meant to be taken apart. It’s very satisfying.”

A project like this demands ingenuity — oh, and fire, a phoenix is made of the stuff.

Allen checked both boxes with an invention of his: The Flame Knife, a long, silver contraption attached to various spots on Metaphoenix’s facade that’s intended to bring a new kind of burn to Burning Man.

“It’s basically like your household blowtorch,” explains Allen, who has worked with fire in a laboratory setting for 15 years in the San Francisco area, first in the alternative energy industry. “We’ve extended that out to a 7- to 10-foot long blade of just continuous blowtorch coming out. It’s like, how do we use what we know to make something that’s never been seen before?”

Bracken’s clearly enthused about the concept.

“The Flame Knife will make it look like the wings are constantly on fire,” he says.

“It’s not, ‘look like it,’ Allen corrects. “They will be.”

A motley crew

Burning Man is a highly communal event — appropriately, so has been the building of the Metaphoenix.

In the warehouse office, there’s a whiteboard tacked to the wall tracking the many out-of-towners coming to work on the project.

“We have an Airbnb that’s just, like, full of Canadians,” Bracken notes.

Among the Canucks: Christiane Yerex, a veteran effects tech in the Canadian film and television industry who has worked on series such as “Star Trek Discovery” — “I was building Federation starships and stuff like that” — “American Gods” and “Umbrella Academy,” to name a few.

Other members of the Metaphoenix crew have similar backgrounds.

“Working in film is a lot like building an art car,” Bracken postulates. “There’s a new creative challenge, and it requires a certain amount of novelty.”

Chief among those challenges in constructing a vehicle of this magnitude is stabilizing its massive, foldable wings so that they don’t bounce and create stress on the metal, which is what Yerex is wrangling with at the moment.

“A lot of the wings and stuff is figuring out how to make a structural and folded shape not move around too much because they are pretty heavy,” she says, sweat dampening her blue-green hair. “This has definitely put my skills to the test, for sure.”

While everyone brings their own skill set to the table, there’s no rigid division of labor here.

“You’ve just got to fill in where you’re needed,” says Bill Bayer, a Bay Area-based electrician with a tattoo of a soldering iron on his right forearm, who’s working on a customized control box inside the bus.

Nearby, Jordan Zamore, a local lighting designer with plug earrings and a “Make Music Great Again” tank-top, tests out the vehicle’s pulsating LED system, which he controls with an app on his phone.

“I think one of the big challenges we’ve really faced in getting this together is just sort of the order of operations,” he says, “trying to get everything to come together at the same time, in the same place.”

So why is everyone doing this, then?

Why are some of them putting in 12-hour shifts, working until 1 a.m. many nights for weeks on end in a stuffy garage hot enough to make a forest fire sweat?

For Zamore, it all traces to back the aforementioned spirit of self-reliance and self-expression at the heart of the event in question.

“It’s going to be my first time going to Burning Man, so I see it fitting that I work with something that I made,” he says. “I didn’t even want to go to Burning Man without at least having some kind of art involvement.”

Bayer puts it a bit more simply.

“I was told it was going to be a good time,” he grins.

Approaching the flame-enhanced finish line

“All hands up top!”

It’s a command over 400 days in the making.

Yerex instructs her co-workers to join her as she stands on the back of Metaphoenix, high above a parking lot shared with an auto body shop and its payload of doorless minivans and smooshed Infiniti sedans.

Down below, a forklift elevates the head up to an awaiting crew.

Up, up, up it goes — gradually, deliberately — like a slow-motion button has been pressed on the scene unfolding before our widening eyes.

They guide the crowning bird sculpture into place at the front of the vehicle, suspended above the hood; it’s directly in the path of the setting sun and shines like freshly waxed linoleum.

And then it’s time to take the whole of Metaphoenix in for the first time: Regal and majestic, yet rife with sharp angles and a metallic sheen, it looks like something Frank Gehry might craft if he was set designing “Mad Max.”

It’s quite the thing to behold, and it required a lot of time and money to get here, between paying the crew — this is not an all-volunteer project like the previous art cars were — and the higher prices of steel and aluminum because of supply-chain bottlenecks related to the pandemic.

And at $2.50 a gallon, the cost of all that fire-fueling propane is considerable seeing as how Metaphoenix might run through 200 gallons a night when going full blast.

“Over the course of a weeklong event like Burning Man, the propane costs could be like $5,000,” Bracken notes.

“At some point, we’re going to have to go aggressive-fundraiser-party-mode after this is done,” he says of covering the expense of Metaphoenix’s construction, which he would describe only as “below six figures.”

They also plan to tour the vehicle to events around the country as they did with their previous creations and earn money that way.

Bracken expresses doubt about ever building another art car again — this just may be the last one he has in him.

One thing he’s more certain about: using the project as a means of bolstering the local arts community, with Metaphoenix probably remaining in Vegas after touring is completed.

”We think the Phoenix is just the first step in what we see as a permanent art space that we want to create after this,” he explains, “and then help other people make — not only more pieces like this — but anything that comes to mind.”

For now, though, there’s still more work to be done here, small details to be completed — a disco ball has yet to be hung in the front of the vehicle; safety railings need to be added in places.

But this is still a moment to savor.

What started as a rough design painted in watercolor by Poliak early last year has come to life, fantasy has become reality.

It may be easy for some to roll their eyes at the Utopian idealism at the core of Burning Man, but give it this much: It inspired this bunch of dreamers to realize a dream.

As dusk settles in, flames brighten the darkening sky.

The Metaphoenix has risen.

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jbracelin76 on Instagram