Wild, wonderful and wistful—this survey of Pipilotti Rist at the Geffen Contemporary is long overdue in this town, where she has rarely been shown. “Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor” is a trippy series of multimedia installations with videos and immersive projections that both delight and alarm. Rist is pushing boundaries, though in a gentle sort of way.

The smallest video in the show is on a tiny monitor embedded in the floor when you step from the Geffen’s lobby into the cavernous first gallery of the exhibition. Selfless in the Bath of Lava (1995) shows a naked woman swimming in lava, as in the fiery pits of hell. She looks up plaintively and calls out in various languages, “Help me!” Like much of Rist’s work, it elicits laughter and unease at the same time. It’s funny to find a small woman shouting out from the floor, it’s also unsettling to imagine a human being is trapped down there, in eternal damnation.

The first gallery is like a movie set—familiar yet surreal. It’s twilight in dreamtime Los Angeles, the facade of a mid-century home with a backyard BBQ on the left, a two-story clapboard house on the right. In between are seating areas where you can contemplate the floating images projected about you—close-ups of plants and of skin. Interspersed are fixed monitors with more streaming images, and a hypnotic electronic score plays in the background.

Pipilotti Rist, Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless In The Bath Of Lava) (video still), 1994, audio video installation. © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine.

Other installations are accessed from this point, and the first you will want to go into is the “house” on the left, with its areas for bedroom, dining room, living room. Perhaps the most fun will be to take off your shoes and get atop the bed where a vertiginous video of shifting clouds/ocean is projected, and a figure appears—this time clothed and effortlessly floating. You can also sit on chairs and sofas, or rest on beanbags to watch the two-channel video in the corner. Quirky little objects, books and pictures line shelves and walls.

Probably Pipilotti’s best-known work is in a room of its own where the rather hilarious video Ever is Over All (1997) is projected on two adjoining walls. A young woman in a blue dress and red shoes strolls blithely down a Zurich street, swinging a flower on a long stem (made of metal). She’s deliriously happy—as in a shampoo or deodorant commercial—and every so often she stops at a parked car, swings her flower, and smashes the side window. Then she laughs wildly and moves on. A policewoman passing her gives a salute. Is this a feminist anthem? It’s certainly cathartic to see a woman joyously act out in public, and get away with it. The artist states that it was all carefully planned, and because they were on such a tight budget they could only break a side window—all the cars were on loan, and Rist had them fixed for the owner afterwards.

The show’s title riffs off Mr. Rogers’ song in the long-running kid’s TV show, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” It’s familiar, but now shifted into another state of consciousness. There’s a sweet soul beneath the surface of irony and black humor that permeates the show. Take the various cards scattered throughout—a reference to Yoko Ono’s “instructions”—which tell us not to touch the art, but to slow down, be kind, do wacky gentle things. For example, one says, “Please do not touch/ HEAR COLORS, SEE SOUNDS.”