A new immersive installation by Paal Anand at the historic St. Vincent Medical Center asks visitors to witness what too many Americans look away from. It opens May 27.
LOS ANGELES — Inside a hospital room that has not seen a patient in six years, a young man sits on a hospital bed. He is dressed in plain clothes, hands folded in his lap. The room is blue with broken glass and debris on the floor — the aftermath of an explosion you cannot see. He is not really there. He is a hologram, and he is reading a letter.
The letter, like the man, is a composite. Paal Anand — the Culver City–based artist who created the room — built the voice from the final writings of American veterans who died by suicide after returning from war. According to Veteran’s Stand Together, there are now twenty-six such deaths every day in the United States. Anand’s installation, “The Ward That Never Closed,” is one of more than eighty rooms inside Hospital of Emotions, the immersive art exhibition opening to the public May 27 inside the shuttered St. Vincent Medical Center near downtown Los Angeles.
“There is no way you can walk out and look away,” Anand told the Los Angeles Times in a May 20 article previewing the exhibition. The Times described the show as “a 45,000-square-foot immersive maze of grief, joy, fear and hope-driven installations,” and singled out Anand’s room as a centerpiece of what the paper called the exhibition’s “prominent throughline” of invisible trauma and recovery through art.
Anand, who serves as Co-Chair of the Culver City Arts Foundation, is a former Hollywood visual effects artist with more than two decades of feature-film credits including “Hellboy” and the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. He transitioned to a full-time fine art practice several years ago, working at the intersection of immersive installation, fine art photography, and emerging technology. He is a 2026 Ambassador for the Arte Laguna Prize in Venice, an Arte Laguna World Hall of Fame inductee, and a fifteen-time Graphis Gold Photography Award recipient.”The Ward That Never Closed” marks a clear departure from the mythology-rooted surrealist work for which Anand has been internationally recognized. The piece is not a metaphor. It is a record. The voice the visitor hears is built from real letters by real veterans, edited and woven together with the families’ consent. The hospital room — already eeri e in its silence, frozen in time since St. Vincent’s closed in 2020 — becomes the after-image of an IED explosion, complete with the debris, the broken equipment, and the one survivor who came home to a country that was not prepared to receive him.
“I wanted to make a room where they are seen,” Anand has said of the work, “not as statistics, but as the specific people they were.”
The installation is presented in partnership with Veterans Stand Together (VST), the South Gate–based 501(c)(3) nonprofit that has served more than 8,000 veterans since 2020 through its vocational, housing, and mental health divisions. VST’s founder, George Casillas, was named Los Angeles County Veteran of the Year in 2022. The organization partners with the LA County Department of Mental Health’s Veterans Peer Access Network and operates under a peer-support philosophy.
“It asks the visitor to witness something real,” Casillas said of the installation, “and then it makes sure the visitor has somewhere to go with what they witnessed. We are happy to be that partner.” VST will have Peer Support Specialists at the room’s exit corridor and offers take-home cards with crisis resources and information about VST’s programs.
The work has already drawn notice from within the Los Angeles arts community. During a preview viewing, Alexey Steele — California Creative Corps member and Culver City Artist Laureate Emeritus — was photographed inside the installation, iPhone raised, documenting the holographic figure on the hospital bed. The photograph has become one of the press images circulating in advance of opening weekend.
Hospital of Emotions itself is a notable cultural event for Los Angeles. The exhibition is presented by Royva, produced by Oshri Elmorich, and curated by Yaara Sachs of House of Art & Dreams. It occupies four floors of the former St. Vincent Medical Center at 2131 West 3rd Street — a building founded in 1856 by the Daughters of Charity as Los Angeles’ first hospital, closed in bankruptcy in 2020, briefly used as a COVID-19 treatment site, and now transitioning into the St. Vincent Behavioral Health Campus, a $300-million, 800-bed mental health, addiction, and housing facility expected to open in 2028. The exhibition occupies the building in the interval — a temporary art use of a space about to become permanent care.
Seventy artists are participating across the building’s eight thematic “departments” of human emotion: Joy, Love, Fear, Anger, Hope, Sadness, Gratitude, and Resilience. Anand’s room sits within the Fear Department. Tickets are $42 to $58, with a portion of proceeds benefiting the future behavioral health campus’s nonprofit administrative organization. The exhibition is on view daily, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and runs through July 31.Information and tickets are available at hospitalofemotions.com.
If You Need Help
The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24 hours a day, free, in English and Spanish. Call or text 988. Veterans, press 1 to reach the Veterans Crisis Line. Veterans Stand Together can be reached at usavest.org.
If You Go
What: “Hospital of Emotions” — immersive art exhibition with 70 artists across 80 rooms and four floors. Paal Anand’s “The Ward That Never Closed” is in the Fear Department Room 75.
Where: 2131 W 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90057 (former St. Vincent Medical Center, Westlake district)
When: May 27 through July 31, 2026. Daily, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Tickets: $42 to $58. Available at hospitalofemotions.com.
Installation runtime: Approximately 14 minutes per cycle.
Content advisory: Depicts post-service veteran experience including suicide and trauma. Not recommended for visitors under 16.
Paal Anand with Veteran’s Stand Together at the Installation
