Artists transform a shuttered Los Angeles hospital into an immersive exhibition exploring human emotions

St. Vincent Medical Center, founded in 1856 by the Daughters of Charity to treat poor people, went bankrupt in 2020 and was purchased by private investors. The site is slated for redevelopment into a homeless shelter and mental health and drug treatment facility, with the first phase expected to open later this year. Until then, its rooms have been handed over to artists.

The project was created in the spirit of Meow Wolf and other for-profit amusement centers that approach art as entertainment. Color-coded creature characters modeled on Pixar's "Inside Out" appear throughout the show, personifying emotions from joy and hope to anger and sadness. IV bags filled with rainbow-colored liquids, exam lights draped in artificial flowers, and crutches topped with cartoonish wigs turn sterile medical spaces into vivid installations.

Individual rooms address specific emotional territories organized into departments. In the "Fear Department," one installation features a virtual character delivering a speech about post-traumatic stress from combat service, then reading a suicide note compiled from multiple veterans' experiences using AI. In a neighboring room, artist Grisha Stepanian covered the walls floor to ceiling with black-and-white portraits drawn in frenetic lines — work informed by his 15 months spent in a U.S. immigration detention center after leaving Russia in 2022. Artist Dongpu Ling filled another room with transparent figurines molded from packing tape, placed on gurneys and disappearing into ceiling vents, drawing on her grandfather's dying visions and her own childhood hospitalization. The "Resilience Department" includes an interactive audio piece about an artist's epileptic seizure, and a room by artist Melan Allen covered in sunny-side up eggs representing food she was forced to eat as a child.