How does one capture a sense of time bedeviling itself? Experimental filmmaker and artist Pat O’Neill’s show here, “The Decay of Fiction,” interrogated this notion. The first time I visited, I felt as if I were witnessing a palimpsest of hauntings—decades of ghosts sealed inside a building’s many surfaces roaming freely. Yet the second time around I experienced an additional sensation: a sustained feeling of displacement caused less by the spooks’ presence than by an uncanny sense of their being both stuck inside a specific historical moment and forever pushed outside it.

Los Angeles filmmaker Pat O’Neill had only ever been inside the Ambassador Hotel once in his life before he began work on a project about the building that would absorb him for years. It was the 1950s. He was a boy. And his great-grandfather was visiting from Kansas.

“He was a grand sort of person,” O’Neill says of his great-grandfather. “He stayed there, and we went to visit him and have dinner with him.” At that point, the Ambassador, which had opened its doors in 1921, was more than three decades old. “It already was quite worn,” he recalls.

He hardly could have imagined then what would become of the building — or that he would spend years in the 1990s working on a film that would take place within its walls.

The works on display raises questions about the self in relation to others, collective norms, and the built environment. Through their distinct process and subject matter, each artist points out the links and fissures in our lives and the larger systems that we attempt to grapple with from science to spirituality and spaces in between. O’Neill’s two-channel projection environment, ‘No Wonder - Two Skins’ (2013) and Fleming’s multichannel video installation, ‘A Theory of Everything’ (2015) creates a chronological bridge between the works, suggesting a comparison of American society of the past and present. Both artists use found collage and original to create new stories that are devoid of a straight narrative and cinematic convention.

CALIFORNIA ABOUNDS WITH BEGUILING PLACE NAMES. The divergence between promise and reality may be no greater than in the case of the Chocolate Mountains. Stretching more than sixty miles across the Colorado Desert that traverses Riverside and Imperial counties in Southern California, they form a geography that few Californians have seen, let alone visited. Home to the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range, a practice site used by the Navy and Marines and inaccessible to the public, the region’s arid and inhospitable topography is magnified by the unsettling thought that somewhere over a distant crest shimmering in the heat the weapons that will be deployed in the wars of tomorrow are being tested today.

Pat O’Neill’s Where the Chocolate Mountains (2015) nimbly plays on these associations. Although we never actually see the mountains, we hear their name spoken by a character on the soundtrack of an old film noir, one of many elements that O’Neill transforms into a wholly new and vital substance, confirmation that he remains the master alchemist of Los Angeles experimental cinema. Instructional films, B movies, Caruso, and 1920s jazz are but some of the ingredients in a rich visual and sonic mix realized with his longtime collaborator, George Lockwood.

Los Angeles-based artist Pat O’Neill has been making work for the last 50 years, and yet it’s rarely seen in New York. A key figure in West Coast experimental cinema, O’Neill is probably best known for highly plastic and technically accomplished films like his lysergic 7362 (1967) or his extraordinary 35mm feature Water and Power (1989), an experimental documentary concerning, among many things, the development of the Los Angeles Basin from prehistory to the present. But since the start of his career O’Neill has also been involved in an astonishing range of media—photography, sculpture, collage, and installation, in both commercial and independent spheres. Now in his late seventies, O’Neill is the subject of his first New York solo exhibition, which offers a concise but judicious sampling of his varied output.

Has the well of previously undiscovered L.A. artists (to East Coast audiences, anyway) run dry? Apparently not, as Pat O'Neill's New York debut attests. Two films, five sculptures and twenty-odd drawings by the California artist, made since the 1960s, reveal preoccupations with slick surface and surreal juxtapositions that resonate with the post-Internet sensibility.

While Pat O’Neill is primarily known as an experimental filmmaker, this small retrospective, which filled two moodily lit galleries with five decades’ worth of sculptures, drawings, photographs, slides, and films, made a case for another, adjacent view of his practice—one concerned with fixed visual forms. In Untitled (Dingo 4), 1980, four identical gelatin silver prints of a dog appeared side by side, each overlain with a small photocopy that was partially obscured, in turn, by a different-colored paint chip—a frame-by-frame dissolve from color to color that recalled O’Neill’s movies.

If computers could dream, Pat O’Neill might be their Sigmund Freud. His multilayered films, sculptures, collages and drawings — in a mesmerizing mini-survey at Cherry and Martin — seem to be made from the deleted files, trashed photos and lost messages that are beyond the reach of our phones and notebooks but still out there in the ether, with the capacity to come back to haunt us, sometimes savagely.

This Friday, three of Mr. O’Neill’s films — “7362” from 1967; “Runs Good,” from 1970, and “Trouble in the Image,” from 1996 — will be shown as part of the film program at the Art Basel fair. The 99-seat theater is expected to be sold out.

Film is an increasingly important part of this year’s Art Basel — and, by extension, of the collectible contemporary art world. The film program, organized by Marc Glöde and This Brunner and running until Saturday, features a world premiere, a European premiere, and retrospective and thematic evenings.