Guts is courage. Every artist needs it. To spill your guts is to tell the truth. To go with your gut is to trust your instincts. A gut feeling is one you just know. To be gutted is to be deeply disappointed. The guts of something are its innermost workings. Above all, guts are those slithery things that our insides become when they’re outside—the unpretty but wondrous purple tubes that help us process the stuff we consume.

Guts is also an immersive installation from 2022 by Los Angeles artist Samara Golden—though ‘immersive’, usually applied to blandly entertaining sculptural environments, does no justice to her passionately ambivalent art. Using mirrors, those common yet miraculous devices that reflect but also estrange the world, she drives wedges of illusion into given architecture and levers open impossible spaces. Then, with Home Depot materials and handmade props, she furnishes those interiors emotionally. What are created in the process, as the title of Guts suggests, are views right into what ails us.

From a mezzanine in LA’s Night Gallery you peer into Golden’s mirror world. An apartment tower with open layers plunges endlessly upward and downward. One layer holds iridescent-blue fabric waves—a flood or paradisiacal ocean. Another is strewn with reclining human bodies in radioactive greens, oranges, and yellows. Another holds snakes and crabs, similarly irradiated.

There’s a swimming-pool level, as if in a high-end hotel, and a storm-tossed or trashed apartment. Toppled lamps glow in the slew of stuff—furniture, blankets, takeaway cups. Finally, there’s a layer piled with the guts of the title: a slithering sea of intestines entwined with computer cables. All the while you can see yourself, multiplied endlessly, in the arena of space around the building. Where are you? What is happening?

Golden’s art is personal but not confessional: she wants us to find our own bearings in it. But her worlds do emerge from the pressures and particulars of her own American life. As a teen in Detroit in the wake of the automotive industry’s collapse, Golden witnessed the physical effects of recession and structural inequality. The city was strewn, she recalls, with ‘vacant, half-destroyed houses. Oftentimes the exterior wall would be missing, so you could see straight into the living room and see the open sky behind a sofa and chair.’

Fittingly for a post-GFC America of foreclosed homes and corporate bailouts, Golden’s early installations were small rooms glutted with aspirational objects and a feeling of incipient panic. To this day, Golden admits, she’s receptive to a fault to the troubles that cram the infosphere. In her studio east of downtown LA, she works all day with news streaming in through her headphones.

Yet Golden could never be called a commentator. I think she’d agree with Lauren Berlant’s definition of feelings as ‘the body’s response to the world, something you’re always catching up to’. Guts is not ‘about’ the pandemic or the subprime housing crisis or extreme weather. It does not ‘address’ class division or rising waters or the dread of war. Yet it catches, like no other art I know, the feverish mental atmosphere generated by those problems.

The layers of the building are the layers of a mind, each holding incompatible thoughts. Or they’re the layers of a society in crisis that one mind is trying to hold and reconcile. Beauty, brutality, wreckage, and wonder all live in the building. Within this big picture, Golden’s gift is for creating details that scuttle and slide into your consciousness without explaining themselves symbolically—like the snakes and crabs (envoys of non- human survival?) and the gruesome, lovingly painted guts. I imagine future visitors wading through this stew and trying to read the entrails of our messed-up moment.

This is a troubled place. But there’s something else—a shimmering and crystalline quality. ‘I want to create an impossible space’, Golden says, ‘a place that nobody could actually go in real life.’ She speaks of wanting to summon ‘something unknown to the artist’. The symmetry of the structure and its bedevilling reflections make me think of temples and altarpieces, those sacred locations where light and intricacy are used to nudge us towards a glimpse of other realities. Neither heaven nor hell, Guts strikes me instead as a glittering limbo—an in-between space populated by figures of worry that Golden calls ‘souls’ and ‘transitional people’.

This, in the end, is the thing that generates her installation’s haunting power—the tension between the otherworldliness of the mirror space and the frightening storm that seems to have swept through it. The sensation is one of seeing right in yet simultaneously being unhoused and suspended. In this insomniac apartment, there’s no comfort zone. Guts gets us where we live.