A little over a week before opening, Colorado Springs artist Kai Gaynor and members of her team are prepping the Meanwhile Block for her ambitious, immersive exhibit, “Transcendent Femme.”

Upon entering the downtown warehouse near Weidner Field, visitors will pass through a front desk and gift shop area, off which is the Childhood Blues room, where people can reconnect with their childhoods by watching VHS tapes and DVDs on an old TV.

“The first place you stop off in life is childhood,” said Gaynor, president of the Pikes Peak Art Council and an art instructor at Concrete Couch, a nonprofit that builds creative community projects. “Since this is an exhibit all about the evolution of the self, we have to talk about our childhood.”

Visitors will move into the Hall of Reflection, a small hallway covered in mirrors and introspective questions. Life and death altars will offer questions to spark reflection.

The “Soul in Shadows,” dedicated to our shadow selves, asks us to ponder the unsavory parts of us we keep hidden from ourselves or society. Gaynor’s large soul painting — how she envisions her soul — will decorate the space.

“A lot of people like to push that stuff down,” Gaynor said. “They’re the thoughts that have come from others, that say I’m not good enough. Who is nagging in my head? This room explains that process and is me showing through my paintings how I’ve dealt with the shadow side of myself.”

Visitors then spill into the sanctuary, a spacious room decorated with large papier-mâché trees to resemble a forest, an analogy for the soul. A stage will provide space for performances throughout October, and a lounge area with art supplies will be available.

Two more rooms off the sanctuary focus on intention and ritual and reverence.

Gaynor intends for the large-scale exhibit to be a deep dive into ourselves, and a chance for reflection and change.

“Transcendent femme means the evolution of self,” she said. “I’m transcending onto something else. I’m letting go of the before. In society, we’re going through a huge shift on the political spectrum, but when I talk to friends, even strangers, they’re also going through their own personal change. Something is happening.”

The exhibit opens with a free reception Friday and will stay open daily throughout the month. Community members also will offer 20 mostly free workshops and events in the space, focused on mind, body and spirit, including yoga, breathwork and herbal healing classes, a silent disco, healing circles, teen nights and queer nights. A few events are ticketed, such as the Blues Social Dance on Saturday.

Growing up with a nondenominational Christian backdrop, Gaynor couldn’t find divine female iconography in the culture around her.

She saw her mother and grandmother and plenty of prominent male figures, but noticed a distinct lack of powerful feminine teachers and spiritual leaders.

“The power of seeing yourself in a larger deity is really important,” Gaynor said. “How I describe it is it’s what Barack Obama was for Black people, to recognize they can be in higher positions in life. I think the same thing for spirituality. When women or people of color get to see themselves recognized as iconography, it really does something to you. It makes me feel I’m the center of focus in my life.”

Gaynor’s exhibit was inspired by what she calls an ancestral download: “A thought that has overtaken me and I believe came from my ancestors.”

The gist of that download? Find a way to represent the divine femme in a space. That download grew into a broader intention: the journey of self-exploration.

“The spirit is the path to the self,” Gaynor said. “Spirituality is my relationship to myself. When I was in high school, I went on a spiritual discovery to get further into the roots of my culture and figure out what matches me, what feels closest to me, instead of just what I’d been given.”

Instead of showing her paintings in a traditional gallery, she decided to create an immersive exhibit.

“White-walled galleries have their purpose, but they’re a little bit oppressive,” she said. “Art should be felt in many ways. It should be a sensorial experience. Of course I can represent the transcendent femme with paintings, but how else can we get the actual viewer involved in the experience of what that evolution feels like? Life is art itself and artists take inspiration from life.”