Kim West’s installation of framed paintings on a custom mural is located within the existing wing of the main hospital, in a service area at the entry of the Harbor UCLA Medical Center’s Psychiatric Emergency Service Unit, which provides dedicated support to adults in distress. Her paintings are part of a growing collection of commissioned artwork for the facility, as the prominence of art in the healing environment has been an important feature at Harbor-UCLA. West’s artwork is part of her ongoing exploration of spaces in her past that felt peaceful and soothing. The artist transformed the ancillary waiting area for the psychiatric emergency room by creating an 8 ½ by 12 feet site-specific mural of a wooded landscape rendered in layers of acrylic washes in soft tones. The landscape envelops the viewer in the small service area. Five landscape paintings from West’s Yosemite Series are mounted into the mural like clear moments within a mirage, where horizons within the framed work and on the mural coincide and overlap. These paintings also are more tangible than the mural- they are framed in natural wood and are rendered in a base palette of saturated color grounded with fluorescent accents. The artist states that for this project she was interested in the dreamy space between an event and its recollection. 

Kim West is a painter whose visual arts practice incorporates studio painting, mural making, and installation work activated by collaborative performance. The NY Times has called West’s murals “dreamlike.” Her projects range from work executed on intimately sized canvasses, to the 5-story-high building façade of the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Los Angeles, to installations that interact with nature and performers in Heidi Duckler Dance Theater’s Lake Enchanto. West’s work can be found throughout Los Angeles, as well as in countless films, television shows, commercials, music videos, and ubiquitously in Instagram-user selfies. To learn more about the artist, visit: www.kimwest.com.