The fringe world of alien believers and self-proclaimed “contactees” was the subject of “Unidentified,” Tony Oursler’s recent exhibition at Redling Fine Art, his first show in Los Angeles in more than a decade. Oursler’s investigation into the emergence of ufo culture could be viewed as an offshoot of his “Imponderable Archive,” a historical collection of more than twenty-five hundred photographs, drawings, publications, documents, and other objects from the eighteenth century to the present related to a variety of occult practices and accounts of paranormal phenomena. (Amassed by the artist

An open book on an angular asymmetrical plinth partially submerged beneath granules of sand: This tableau was the first thing one encountered in Kim Schoen’s “Hawaii,” an exhibition that elsewhere offered the book not as an object but rather as a fantastic, disemboweled placeholder for the printed tome. The paperback on display was one of the hundred that comprise Hawaii (160) (all works 2017), an exquisite editioned artist book featuring texts by Schoen, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, and Jan Tumlir, interleaved with the images on view in the present context and orphan “pages without books” recovered

Among the torso-like, vertically oriented ceramics placed at deliberate intervals throughout “Seizure Crevasse,” Jennie Jieun Lee’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles, a pair of small sculptures situated in and near the gallery’s eponymous pit were the most ominous and compelling. At the bottom of a five-foot-deep, roughly eight-by-four-foot rectangular recess in the gallery’s cement ground (an architectural leftover from the space’s former days as a car repair shop), a modest abstract ceramic piece with a glossy, multihued glaze rested like a decapitated head in a grave. Hovering over the

“I’m always working with multiple, simultaneous perspectives,” Los Angeles–based artist Diana Thater explained to Lynne Cooke in an interview published on the occasion of her 2015 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This statement makes sense, given the complexity of Thater’s subject matter: the networked entanglements between human and other, species and habitat, viewer and viewing space, zebra and zeal (the last a term of venery for a group of zebras). “A Runaway World” adds to the artist’s bestiary of transitory media architectures. The show presents two cruciform structures.