Nine Lives: Visionary Artists from L.A."--an exhibition curated by Ali Subotnick at Los Angeles' Hammer Museum--features nine idiosyncratic Los Angeles-based artists spanning several generations, including Lisa Anne Auerbach, Julie Becker, Llyn Foulkes, Charles Irvin, Hirsch Perlman, Victoria Reynolds, Kaari Upson, Jeffrey Vallance and Charlie White. These artists have in common the aim of transporting viewers to an alternate reality with work that gets under your skin and sticks in your head yet incorporates a degree of self reflection. They eschew the dreamy California cliche of superficial comfort and glamour to instead focus--in profoundly disturbing yet often humorous ways--on the world in which we live.Ali Subotnick is a curator at the Hammer Museum. In 2006, along with her frequent collaborators Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni, she co-curated the 4th Berlin Biennial.