LOS ANGELES (AP) — Just beyond an ambulance and wheelchair ramp wait Dr. Moodswing and Dr. Feelgood, dressed in starched white lab coats and ready to check you in with a neon orange patient wristband.At this hospital though, it’s not your vitals that will be examined, but your feelings. The “Hospital of Emotions” is an immersive art experience that explores different facets of being human inside the long-shuttered St. Vincent Medical Center near downtown Los Angeles.The former hospital was founded in 1856 by the Daughters of Charity religious order to treat poor people before it went bankrupt in 2020 and was bought by private investors. The site will be redeveloped into a homeless shelter and mental health and drug treatment facility, with the first phase opening later this year.But until the end of September, the hospital rooms are filled with 80 installations by 70 artists. Each artist received around $14,000 to transform four floors of clinical space into explorations of feelings around everything from medical and family trauma to grief over climate change and immigration detention centers.
Sterile hospital spaces are turned into colorful art installationsThe project was created in the spirit of Meow Wolf and other for-profit amusement centers that approach art as entertainment. As in Pixar’s “Inside Out,” color-coded creatures sprinkled throughout the show personify a range of emotions from joy and hope to anger and sadness. A fuzzy orange monster winks from behind a nurse’s station, while dueling green giants symbolizing jealousy face off in an otherwise normal exam room, their faces decorated with absurd, clownlike expressions.IV bags are full of rainbow-colored liquids, overhead exam lights are festooned with a canopy of artificial flowers, and crutches are draped with campy, cartoonish wigs.
