TORRANCE : Art Exhibit Displays Daily Life at Hospital

The scenes are stark, even haunting. Bodies huddle together in a crowded emergency department waiting room. Animated nurses chat while a patient wearing a respirator stares wanly at them from a nearby table, surrounded by tubes and monitors.

This is medicine as seen by two artists who were granted unusual access to the South Bay’s largest and busiest hospital, Los Angeles County Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.

Their impressions are recorded in “The Hospital Project,” an exhibit at the South Bay Contemporary Museum of Art in Torrance. Through paintings, drawings and writings, Marc Baseman of Taos, N.M., and Peggy Sievert of Lawndale examine daily life in the Harbor-UCLA emergency department and intensive-care unit.

In scene after scene, patients are shown separated from health care workers, whether in a waiting room or lying in bed while doctors confer. That message has not escaped exhibit organizers, who describe it in the program as “an educational effort which seeks to ask, ‘What is a hospital? What are its values? What are the ghosts and the realities of care which we do not see or cannot recognize?’ ”

The show was spearheaded by Dr. Jerome Block, Harbor-UCLA chief of medical oncology and the museum’s past president. Block said he first thought of bringing artists into the hospital as a way of illustrating how patients get well. But when volunteer artists Baseman and Sievert went to work, the focus shifted.

“It evolved into some artworks that reflect patient isolation and patient aloneness that doctors and nurses may not be aware of,” said Block, who praised the county hospital for permitting the project.

“The Hospital Project” will continue through June 3 at the South Bay Contemporary Museum, 24544 Hawthorne Blvd., Torrance. For information, call (310) 375-3316.