This week the Review Crew dips into some of the more heavily promoted immersive experiences of the season, including Hospital of Emotions in L.A. and The Jury Experience, which can be found in London and other cities.
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Hospital of Emotions (Los Angeles)
The House of Art and Dreams
$58 through August 31st
There are few places as emotionally charged to be in as a hospital. Whether we are brought there out of physical necessity or to visit an ailing friend or family member, the stresses that the sterile environment places upon our psyches can stretch us to the emotional breaking point. This spirit provides a contrast that the current pop-up art exhibit The Hospital of Emotions attempts to face head-on, to varying degrees of success.
Taking over four floors of a decommissioned wing of the St. Vincent’s Medical Center, the project is led by a team called The House of Art and Dreams. The House of Art and Dreams is an Israeli collective that specializes in repurposing decommissioned buildings and creating a narrative structure for other artists to work within, with this being their fifth installation, and their first in the United States.
The experience begins promising enough with the intake triage room for check-in, and guests are given an emotional medical chart. Guests are then directed to go through a series of “departments” each corresponding to an emotional state, where the real meat of the exhibition lies. Almost every room of the repurposed wing, whether a patient room or just a triage corner, has been transformed by artists into installations with various degrees of interactivity and little connectivity to those pieces installed around them. They start with the emotional states of “Resilience” and “Joy”, ending with a floor dedicated to “Fear”, with the whole gamut in between. It wasn’t until the halfway point that more video pieces get introduced representing more challenging emotions. That’s when the experience transforms from a mediocre selfie palace into more hard-hitting emotional explorations. After static fluffy pieces on the first couple of floors, I was floored with a fifteen-minute video installation reflecting on veterans with PTSD who had committed suicide in the “Fear” section. After some of the most challenging pieces, the whimsy of the departing section tries to bring us back home… The last stop is a flower shop, common to hospitals, the difference being that these flowers are all made out of pipe cleaners, so they’re fuzzy and artificial, facts that one wouldn’t realize until they noticed the lack of a floral aroma or a close inspection of said flowers.
As the St. Vincent facility will eventually become a mental health campus, this transitional creative project can hopefully function as a burning of sage for whatever energy previously existed in that space. While the location and some of the connecting soundscapes and musical compositions made me reflect on the nature of healing and wellness, the whole of the experience left me flat knowing that many will just use it for their next update on Instagram, and the artists met that most basic of expectations.
– Martin Gimenez, Correspondent at Large
The Jury Experience (London)
Fever
From £36.75; Shaw Theatre, through 19 November 2026
Boasting a rotating lineup of cases for the audience to experience, one can admire The Jury Experience for working to keep their content fresh: my companion and I attended an iteration titled “Diamonds, Lies, and A Dead Man” though there are at least four others currently on the docket for the remainder of the year. The experience is framed around a standard proscenium theatre full of guests (there are a couple hundred of us in attendance) watching what is, essentially, a no-fourth-wall stage production of a simplified court case wherein the cast is appealing directly to us to review the merits of their arguments.
Our interaction responsibilities are light: we’re encouraged to debate amongst ourselves at appropriate times over whether we believe the testimony and then vote via a mobile phone portal on what questions we want the witnesses to answer and whether or not the defendant should be convicted. We’re not particularly sure how our individual votes weigh in (i.e. there may be a railroaded result built in but it’s not worldbreaking and the voting does add some suspense)
In the end the judgement comes through and the sentence is passed. But contrary to pretty much all expectations, they do not tell us if we got it “right” and if the defendant was actually guilty or not. On the one hand a theatrical audience would certainly expect to be told if the basic agency that they exercised was for the best, however the immersive argument would be that a real jury will never know, and so like every other court case we must simply live with our decision.
With a very light hand in the realm of agency, The Jury Experience is a reliably-running beginners entry point to the experience of having responsibility in a theatrical production. I’d send anyone to it who is intimidated by the idea of immersive theatre, and then if they enjoy it subsequently book them into Jury Games for a bit more hands-on deliberation.
— Shelley Snyder, London & UK Curator
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition (London)
SEE Global Entertainment
From £14; 1 America Square; through 6 September 2026
Having once stood in the Sistine Chapel just after opening, the space almost misty with the rising sun bouncing off white trim between the bright murals and the floor slowly crowding with other guests, I remember craning my head up to stare at the riot of colors and squinting, trying to take in any of the details. It was impossible. I knew they were amazing but they were too far away to absorb anything other than the thought that these were masterpieces and because they were mounted on the ceiling and upper walls, we marching proletariat would never be close enough to touch the heavens the way her artists had.
This exhibition does the labour of bringing the heavens to the people. Flawlessly photographed and printed in actual scale on canvas mounted along the floor-level walls and single-story ceiling, the effect of light classical music and walking between aisles of monumental murals is still dwarfing. We move between pieces at the same distance as their painters would have been, being overlooked or stared at by 550-year-old martyrs, saints, and sinners whose auras of gravitas are tempered by craquelure and exposure decomposition a viewer would never be able to see from the chapel floor.
The space at 1 America Square is decorated with large antique mirrors, evidently a happenstance of the venue rather than an exhibition design choice, and their occasionally popping up on brick walls between prints manages to expand the confined space and place us visitors in darkened and scratched context beside the frescoes.
It’s frisson-inducing.
A lovely new perspective on old treasures, an hour is plenty of time for the casual visitor, more for the student of the old masters. One real pleasure is a scale print of The Last Judgement mounted at floor level with the ability to walk up and stare at famous details one normally would never get close to, though there’s a smirk of harsh reality as the photo still shows modern items at the edges such as electric spotlights mounted in the actual chapel. It’s perhaps a producer’s last wink that very little photoshop has been done, and their sobering argument for preservation efforts.
— Shelley Snyder, London & UK Curator
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