One often hears the work of Bobbi Woods referred to as “very LA,” for the majority of her work incorporates movie posters, culled from online vendors and Hollywood memorabilia shops, whose images and language the artist selectively masks with spray enamel. The slick surfaces that remain, we are told, are akin to the finish fetish of cars, surfboards, and postwar LA sculpture. In previous series of such “paintings,” as the artist calls them, Woods has strategically applied black polyhedral shapes, which she likens to the folds of a swaying curtain. In more recent work, she paints over the image

Among the most ambitious gallery shows coinciding with the J. Paul Getty Musuem–instigated “Pacific Standard Time” initiative—a sprawling self-study of Southern California’s emergence as a significant art hub—is a restaging of an exhibition that originated in New York: Peter Bunnell’s “Photography into Sculpture,” which first appeared the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 and traveled to seven other venues before eventually landing at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 1972. (Most of the original objects or similar works by a given artist are included here; a few have been

Berlin-based Austrian artist Karina Nimmerfall, who spent the past year teaching at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, delivered her “take” on Los Angeles via her three-channel video installation Double Location (The Ambassador Hotel), 2008/2011, just days before returning to Germany this fall. Focusing on the exceptional zone that emerges where the virtual space of film/television overlaps with the worldly dimension in which LA residents actually exist, she may well not have been able to craft this work anywhere but here. After all, LA remains the epicenter of the spectacle