Los Angeles Galleries Turn October Toward the Everyday

Ten exhibitions across Los Angeles this October share a common thread: they use the everyday to reveal larger truths about existence, perception and history, according to Hyperallergic's monthly gallery guide.

Four names anchor the month. Ry Rocklen builds portraits of place and family from the human-made detritus and barren landscape of the High Desert. Elliott Hundley, at Regen Projects, charts his subconscious by pinning hundreds of found images to panels. Jordan Nassar practices tatreez — traditional Palestinian embroidery — in multi-panel works that engage with art history as well as cultural erasure and destruction. And a retrospective of LA-based artist Susan Silton showcases her participatory practice beyond gallery walls.

Three East Hollywood exhibitions, all running through October 24, form a walkable core of the program.

Where can you see Ry Rocklen's desert ceramics?

Ry Rocklen's Desert Lenses runs at Wilding Cran, 607 North Western Avenue, through October 24. Rocklen, who lives near Joshua Tree just east of Los Angeles, finds what Hyperallergic calls magic in the mundane, making visible the stories embedded in ordinary objects.

The show centers on photo-based ceramics that juxtapose natural and human-made elements in the desert — monochrome still lifes hidden inside the shell of a rusted shopping cart or a battered bus. Casts of his family members' socks, made in paper and aluminum, accompany these works. Each sock, per the guide, conveys a remarkable sense of personality through its rumpled form.

The exhibition includes the 2024 ceramic work 99 and Sunny, glazed with ceramic decals.

What opens at Jeni Abramson Gallery?

Michel Auder's Remains of the Day inaugurates Jeni Abramson Gallery at 461 North Western Avenue, also through October 24. The French-born photographer and filmmaker has spent over five decades plumbing the gulf between art and life through diaristic videos, travel logs and experimental films that filter politics, culture and art history through a poetic, autobiographical lens.

The debut exhibition gathers snapshots, film stills and archival documentation from throughout Auder's career. The selection, Hyperallergic writes, offers several paths through which to enter his singular image-based vision. The 2014 chromogenic print Bed. Photo of Photos is among the works on view.

What defines Roberta Gentry's 'Blood Orange'?

Roberta Gentry's Blood Orange at Track 16, 706 Heliotrope Drive, runs through October 24. The LA-based painter fuses medieval imagery, scientific illustration and psychedelia, producing organic, eccentric canvases that balance geometric abstraction with whimsy — scenes resembling visions from a lost civilization.

The works in Blood Orange restrict themselves to a palette of cool blue and radiant orange, sharpening the interplay of form and fantasy. The 2026 acrylic A Golden Collar is included.

Track 16 will host a talk with Gentry and artist Chris Ulivo on October 11 at 1pm — the month's single dated public program among the three highlighted shows, and a chance to hear the painter discuss her sourcing directly.

With Hundley at Regen Projects, Nassar's embroidered panels and the Silton retrospective adding weight elsewhere in the city, October positions Los Angeles as a place where small, close-looking exhibitions — a sock, a snapshot, a shopping cart — carry the month's biggest arguments.