Art has long been likened to a mirror that reflects an image of society back to itself; “life imitates art” and whatnot. For several of the exhibitions featured this month, however, the artists instead hold up fun-house mirrors that reflect strange, bewildering, and in some cases utopian, variations of the real. For five decades, William Leavitt has been refracting Hollywood facades, constructing open-ended narratives from discarded props and sets. Meanwhile, In Media Res features a cadre of feminist artists who find community in decentralized digital spaces. In his visionary canvases, Burt Shonberg offered visual portrayals of mind-altering psychedelia. A two-venue survey of Ben Caldwell’s career gives a veteran media arts innovator his due, showcasing his expansive, empowering futurism.

Maura Brewer: Leverage

Timeshare, 3526 North Broadway, Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles
Through November 16

Maura Brewer’s 2024 video essay “Offshore” illuminates money laundering on an international scale through a labyrinthine network of offshore banks and freeport art storage facilities. She continues her exploration of the nexus of capital and art with her follow-up, “Leverage” (2024), zooming in on one particular figure: billionaire investor and Museum of Modern Art Trustee Daniel Sundheim. Referencing public records, Brewer documents how Sundheim uses his art collection as collateral for loans to buy more art, which he then uses for collateral to secure loans, in a self-perpetuating loop. She punctuates this narrative with reflections on her own financial and creative struggles as a working artist, adding a personal angle to her accessible breakdowns of market machinations.

William Leavitt: Gothic Electronica

Sebastian Gladstone, 5523 Santa Monica Boulevard, East Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through December 1

Marc Selwyn Fine Art, 9953 South Santa Monica Boulevard, Beverly Hills, California
Through December 3

Gothic Electronica is a two-gallery, 50-year survey of the work of William Leavitt, whose multi-media practice draws from Hollywood, film, mass media, and the landscape of Southern California. Narrative is a running theme in his work, which often blurs the line between theater and fine art. His early photo montages of the 1970s recall film stills, and his installations incorporating light and sound resemble stage sets, notably “Gothic Curtain” (1970/2008), which conjures the unsettling tone of the 1958 British film Dracula. More recent work includes paintings rife with robots, cyborgs, and other man-machine mashups, mixing mid-century space-age futurism with contemporary notions of technological hybridity.

Christopher Suarez: Park Where Ever

Guerrero Gallery, 3407 Verdugo Road, Glassell Park, Los Angeles
November 2–December 7

Christopher Suarez’s intimate, miniature clay replicas document the built environment in and around his native Long Beach. His sculptures honor the everyday, mundane structures that hold special meaning for him, from mom-and-pop restaurants and liquor stores to record shops and strip malls, unglamorous buildings more important for their cultural function than their architectural significance. Suarez renders these edifices candidly, reproducing grimy patinas and crumbling walls with an air of bittersweet affection. For Park Where Ever, he reimagines the concrete patio next to Guerrero Gallery as a makeshift driveway, celebrating the liminal space that is a common site of family gatherings and parties for Latinx families throughout Southern California.

Torrance Art Museum, 3320 Civic Center Drive, Torrance, California
Through December 7

This exhibition features a group of LA-based feminist artists whose work in film, digital art, animation, AI, and sculpture offers multi-faceted visions of the city and the heterogeneous communities that thrive here. Taken together, their practices highlight the potential for online and digital spaces to provide connection within the decentralized and fractured urban landscape. Participating artists include Casey Kauffmann, whose humorous drawings and videos put a mannerist spin on pop cultural icons; Eve-Lauryn LaFountain (Ojibwe), who creates ghostly traces of ritual throughout LA landscapes in her multimedia series Waabanishimo (She Dances Till Daylight) (2023); and Jennifer West, whose holographic installation honors P-22, the late, beloved mountain lion who roamed the wilds of Griffith Park.

Momentary Blasts of Unexpected Light: The Visionary Art of Burt Shonberg

Philosophical Research Society, 3910 Los Feliz Boulevard, Los Feliz, Los Angeles
Through December 21

Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, artist Burt Shonberg was well-known across Los Angeles for blending occult and esoteric elements, psychedelia, sci-fi, and motifs from Ancient Greek and Egyptian art. His murals adored cafes and clubs along the Sunset Strip, his paintings were featured in Roger Corman’s 1960 horror film House of Usher, and he created album art for bands including Love and Spirit. Momentary Blasts of Unexpected Light is the first LA solo show of work by Shonberg (who died in 1977) in 55 years, bringing renewed attention to his mind-expanding and hallucinatory vision.

Vicky Colombet: Flying Back Home

Fernberger, 747 North Western Avenue, East Hollywood, Los Angeles
Through December 21

For her first solo show on the West Coast, French-American artist Vicky Colombet drew inspiration from the land- and seascapes glimpsed during several trans-Atlantic flights. Though these chromatically spare paintings may resemble the crevasses of mountain ranges or white-capped waves, they are equally reflective of psychological landscapes. Painting flat on the ground, she uses squirrel- and goat-hair brushes, chosen for their softness, and the resulting blue or black abstractions are evocative yet confounding, revealing little of her human touch.

Yolanda López: Portrait of the Artist

The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, 3581 Mission Inn Avenue, Riverside, California
Through January 26, 2025

Portrait of the Artist is the first solo museum exhibition dedicated to pioneering Chicana artist and activist Yolanda López, focused on the period from the 1970s through the ’80s during which she created some of her best-known artworks. She often used herself and her female family members as models for her paintings, imbuing real women with monumental status, as evident in “Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe” (1978), in which she depicted herself in running shoes set against the backdrop of the Virgin’s characteristic ring of light. An accompanying exhibition also at the Cheech, Women’s Work is Never Done, features archival materials from the 1960s to the 2010s including studies for her Guadalupe and Three Generations: Tres Mujeres series, political posters, and Xerox experiments.

Peter Saul: Flunking the Talent Test

Michael Werner, 417 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, California
November 23–February 8, 2025

For almost 70 years, Peter Saul has been chipping away at the art world’s arbitrary categorizations, mining a broad aesthetic spectrum that incorporates Pop Art, Surrealism, history painting, and cartoons. At 90 years old, he shows no signs of losing his satirical edge and garish exuberance, as the new work in Flunking the Talent Test attests. In these paintings, a canvas gives its tortured artist the boot, a lumpy vase of flowers turns hostile, and a pair of cow-like devils greet the greedy new arrivals to their bubbling underworld.

Deux Femmes: Leonor Fini & Leonora Carrington

Orange County Museum of Art, 3333 Avenue of the Arts, Costa Mesa, California
Through February 23, 2025

Deux Femmes brings together two female artists who forged groundbreaking creative paths within the male-dominated spheres of 20th-century Surrealism. Argentine-born Leonor Fini moved to Paris in 1931, falling in with a circle of artists including Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí. Her work often featured independent women, characterized by a rebellious eroticism. British-born Leonora Carrington also spent time in Paris, where she became romantically and creatively involved with Ernst, but spent most of her life in Mexico, where she was a pivotal member of the Surrealist scene. In her work, she incorporated psychology, magic, and myth, and asserted her own female sexuality. Deux Femmes highlights how these two artists drew on themes of self-representation, transformation, and multiplicity to foreground their own subjectivities.

KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Media Arts of Ben Caldwell

California African American Museum, 600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles
Through March 8, 2025

Art + Practice, 3401 West 43rd Place, Leimert Park, Los Angeles
Through March 8, 2025

KAOS Theory traces the multi-faceted career of filmmaker, activist, and educator Ben Caldwell. After serving in the Vietnam War, Caldwell studied film at the University of California, Los Angeles, and emerged as a member of the LA Rebellion, a pioneering group of Black filmmakers who challenged Hollywood’s hegemony. He would go on to open the Leimert Park media arts center Kaos Network in the early ’80s, which would become the site of Project Blowed, an influential hip-hop open mic night in the ’90s. More recently, Caldwell has been developing futuristic experiments for community empowerment such as pay phones that record and play oral histories. Inspired by the 2023 book KAOS Theory, this two-venue exhibition offers an exuberant overview of Caldwell’s storied career, characterized by creative generosity and boundless curiosity.