You’re welcomed into a brightly lit room. You push past dark grey curtains into the first room of many. Deep, drawn-out, hollow sounds play from speakers you will never see, but continue to feel the echo of reverberating around your skeleton well after you leave. You can see fleshy figures illuminated on thin, gently swaying sheets, surrounding you from all sides. They are tall and remind you of your own anatomy. Walking around these curtains you see nothing but empty space, there’s a distinct lack of flesh and blood behind this fabric. The walls are stark white, the floor is blood red, nothing here reminds you of a completed human. Stick figure-like wire sculptures jut out from the floors, suspending tubed curtains. You have to remind yourself not to back up into one. You have to wonder why these intestine, organ shaped pieces remind you of someone. 

You exit that room and enter another, walking up two flights of stairs. The wooden stairs show age and use. You’d wonder about their structure if you could see, but all light has faded. Placing your hand on the closest wall to you and tracing your steps into a room filled with red light you’re met with images you can’t describe or explain. Black and white photos, videos of darkness, perhaps something red- resembling words. You leave once again and enter a room that sounds like water is pouring out onto the carpet, another with nothing but mannequins and mirrors, an infinite amount of mannequins, mirrors, and your own self. Another, a single hole in the floor with the bottom visible several feet down. Another, a bridge over endless amounts of cardboard, it’s a sea you could never swim out of and you get vertigo at the thought. Another room, downstairs this time, that smells like iron and a deep cave with a touch of lead. And you finally start to wonder what you paid $25 to see. Welcome to the Mattress Factory.

Located in Pittsburgh, PA is an art exhibit consisting of three buildings, each with multiple floors. Some disturbing, some horrific, all beautiful. Environmental storytelling taken to the extreme, each building and artist making a new and different type of horror. The exhibit- I Hear My Blood Singing by Vivian Cacurri, being the one I mentioned in the first paragraph. Taking up the entire first floor of one building, meant to disturb and provoke feelings of self-reflection as the entrance resembles a gut. In such a well lit room you have no choice but to notice every square inch of this artwork. While others, like Tempus Fugit by Rebecca Shapass, take place in dark rooms, the art being the one light source- placed, static, on carpet. You need to squint and walk the perimeter of the room to take it all in. This room leaves you feeling abandoned in the best, worst way possible. 

Each room and exhibit in the Mattress Factory leaves you with the same hollow, sunken-in feeling. Yet each piece is so uniquely different from the last it’d be impossible to say which left me feeling more terrified. Using sound, movement, and even your own self as techniques to pull this off. 

I did not know what the Mattress Factory was when I first got to Pittsburgh. At the Airbnb I stayed at there was a note on a chalk board about this being a “place to visit.” I’ll admit, I thought this would be an actual mattress factory and was extremely confused as to why anyone would think a literal mattress factory would be a “place to visit.” I mean, the name really didn’t help me draw any conclusions to that question either. Thankfully I had a phone with google and an afternoon to kill. 

Imagine my delight when I find what I think to be a literal mattress factory is actually a multi-building art exhibit. Imagine my greater delight to find this type of art and curation inside every single building.  

The Mattress Factory is a place I can only scratch the surface of describing its horrific beauty and feelings of isolation each piece brings to you. If you have four hours and thirty-five minutes to kill I highly recommend checking this exhibition out.