Rooted in the artist’s hometown of Los Angeles and in the myths around it, Alex Israel’s practice examines and embodies the strategies and aesthetics of the celebrity-driven entertainment industry. Israel’s works present a composite portrait of American pop culture, incorporating actors, reality TV stars, surfers, and props, backdrops and movie sets made on the backlots of Hollywood studios. Using the tactics of self-branding, ubiquitous across the Internet and social media, the artist implicates himself within this visual language of constant visibility and self-promotion. The two works presented at the 58th October Salon—a city-center billboard featuring a painted image of the Los Angeles sky from Israel’s Sky Backdrop series, and a sculpture of a pelican hanging from the ceiling in the museum—although far from each other, are in close conversation, as if they were the setting and the main character in a single dream diffused across time and space. The boundless depth of the sky and the figure of the pelican, whose wings can be made to move by its viewers as in a mobile for children, define through their pairing a united dream of California’s fantastical great-wide-open landscape, a mainstay subject of Israel’s practice.