A PAINTING BY LLYN FOULKES titled The Lost Frontier was the first thing one saw on entering “Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A.”—the fifth installment of the Hammer Museum’s series of biannual exhibitions devoted to delivering a zeitgeist overview of local tendencies and trends, this time curated by Ali Subotnick. Hung on the far wall of a little roped-off room, it served as the scintillating opening sentence of a very promising book. As with much of this artist’s work, the piece features his likeness, recognizable even when turned away from us; he occupies the foreground and looks

Dave Muller’s sixth solo outing at Blum & Poe was the latest chapter of the artist’s ongoing project of chronicling the contents of his bookshelves and record collection. Winding its way free-associatively through Muller’s youth and early fascination with music, the show was, perhaps aptly, titled “iamthewalrus,” unabashedly echoing the 1967 Beatles song written by a purportedly acid-tripping John Lennon and released on the group’s Magical Mystery Tour film sound track when Muller was a mere tot.

Some of the several works on paper in the exhibition fall well short of the surprise that Lennon’s

In 2002, Kerry Tribe produced a book titled North Is West/South Is East: 32 Maps of Los Angeles, for which strangers, approached by the artist at LAX airport, drew maps of southern California from memory. The maps provided by local residents were generally rife with detail, emphasizing idiosyncratic or personal information; the maps drawn by tourists, on the other hand, were often amusingly—if understandably—confused, skeletal, or oversimplified products of the contemporary imaginary. As an example of the latter category, a map might consist only of Hollywood, Disneyland, and the beach—three

Catherine Taft on Erik Frydenborg

Successive breakthroughs in the natural sciences gave rise to a system of graphical schema to represent the natural order—whether the planetary orbits around the sun, the life cycle of plants, or the double-helix structure of DNA. Over the years, such representations, as commonplace as they are useful, have been refined and standardized into efficient hybrids of design and illustration for classrooms and textbooks alike. The modular artwork of Los Angeles–based artist Erik Frydenborg’s debut solo exhibition at Bonelli Contemporary dissects these sorts of educational