Curated by Ali Subotnick

With its vast open spaces and endless freeways that make for hours spent in cars, Los Angeles provides the mental breathing room to obsess over obscure fascinations and to construct elaborate private fictions. For the Hammer Museum’s fifth biannual invitational, Ali Subotnick surveys this psychic terrain, presenting more than one hundred works made since 1960 and sprung from the minds of nine local artists, including Llyn Foulkes, Jeffrey Vallance, and Charlie White. The exhibition’s accompanying catalogue reprints William Faulkner’s short story “Golden Land,” which documents the author’s ambivalence toward the city and its illusory worlds—a love/hate relationship reflected by many works in the show, such as Charles Irvin’s new video styled after conspiracy theory documentaries and Kaari Upson’s installation reimagining the famed Playboy Mansion grotto.

— Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer