WESTLAKE, Calif. — Art is healing, and you’ll find a healthy dose of it at the Hospital of Emotions.
The site-specific installation is in Westlake, inside the former St. Vincent Medical Center, where 70 artists were invited to design 80 rooms — each one devoted to a specific feeling.
“That’s about 40,000 square feet of emotional baggage,” quipped Oshri Elmorich, co-founder and producer of the temporary exhibit.
The medical building has been closed since 2020, and when Elmorich first stepped inside, he said he saw the opportunity to do something transformative — and not just artistically.
“I feel like we all experience so many emotions, especially in hospitals, but we’re not always comfortable with all of the emotions,” he explained. “I think if we all feel more comfortable with all of the emotions, then we can just go through life in such a more smooth way.”
(Spectrum News/Tara Lynn Wagner)
Staff checked guests in scrubs and medical coats.
They are then directed to the sixth floor and work their way back down, passing through the different departments like gratitude, anger, sadness, joy.
“Oh, I have a lot of emotions to share,” said artist Kiki Powell, who was excited when she was assigned Joy.
It’s something she’s thought a lot about since her own recent medical journey. She’d long wanted to have her silicone breast implants removed, and when she was finally able to have the procedure done, it was discovered that one had ruptured.
The recovery, she said, forced her to slow down and realize that joy isn’t always loud and overtly festive.
“It can be also a peaceful way to finally stop being in survival mode,” she said. “And be able to have peace in your heart.”
(Spectrum News/Tara Lynn Wagner)
She and Elmorich collaborated on the room where a silver patient is simply resting, surrounded by softness, her phone disconnected. She hopes people will breathe in the stillness but also allow themselves to take in all of the other emotions on display throughout the hospital — even the ones that make them uncomfortable.
“You will not realize what is joy if you don’t go to sadness or to resilience, or through, you know, like these moments of loss and darkness,” Powell said. “That’s the only way you can actually understand what joy means.”
Hilary Schwartzler brought her daughter and found the rooms very personal. She particularly liked how hospital furniture and medical equipment were incorporated into the displays, sometimes prominently.
“Some people don’t have very good thought processes for IV bags and hospital beds,” she explained. “To integrate all that, to say that is part of the process, you might not like that part of the process, but you kind of got to go through it to get better.”
(Spectrum News/Tara Lynn Wagner)
The defunct medical building was purchased earlier this year and will eventually become a homeless services and behavioral health campus offering housing, job training, addiction treatment, and mental health services. In the meantime, Elmorich said the exhibit fits in with that future mission.
A group of formerly unhoused artists designed one room.
There are also mental health reminders throughout the space, courtesy of the nonprofit The JED Foundation.
“It just sparks a conversation of emotional well-being,” Elmorich said.
And that alone may be just what the doctor ordered.
Hospital of Emotions has been extended and will continue to see patients through Sept. 30.