At the time of this writing, the fifth iteration of this city’s biennial, Made in L.A., a version, was closed to the public. Due to the pandemic, its official unveiling had been pushed off into an indeterminate future on government order, with just a few people allowed in at a time for a sneak peek. Under the circumstances, the haunted tone that pervaded the show by design was considerably augmented. In a Skype conversation transcribed for the biennial’s catalogue, curators Myriam Ben Salah and Lauren Mackler discuss the influence of horror films on their decision-making process. “Traditionally

Certain recurring iconography is quintessential Raymond Pettibon: breaking waves and other emblems of SoCal surf culture, along with superheroes, dogs, racehorses, Hollywood, and the endlessly malleable Gumby and, as the old theme song for the green guy’s TV show went, his “pony pal Pokey, too.” The new drawings and collages in the artist’s eleventh solo outing here, more than half of which were made in 2020, included mainstays but also addressed the myriad traumatic events coincident with their making. Pettibon’s familiar skewering of American venality and imperialism became even more stringent

The press release for Isabelle Albuquerque’s solo exhibition “Sextet” at Nicodim Gallery opens with a quote from David Wojnarowicz: “Inside my head I wished for years that I could separate into ten different people to give each person I loved a part of myself forever and also have some left over to drift, . . . and now I’m in danger of losing the only one of me that is around.” The artist’s six spellbinding sculptures here addressed the myriad conundrums of owning a body, among them the desire for one to become many in order to produce an endlessly proliferating circle of compassion and the