Lecia Dole-Recio’s first solo museum show lent a shimmering vitality to the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s otherwise lackluster “Focus” series of solo museum debuts by emerging Southern California–based artists. In a spare, unerring display of eight recent works, the microtonal play between Dole-Recio’s core concerns (light and color in relation to transparency, translucency, and opacity) conveyed through and by her consistent use of gouache and graphite in conjunction with cardboard, paper, vellum, tape, and glue confirmed her status as one of the most discerning and inventive of

Monica Bonvicini’s recent exhibition in a vacated 18,000-square-foot Organized Living store on the second floor of a Pasadena shopping mall allowed the artist to push her ongoing interrogation of architectural space—specifically, the way in which constructed space defines, and is defined by, sexual politics—to its contextual limit. Featuring more than thirty sculptures, videos, drawings, collages, and installations dating from 1998 to the present, the show also served as a de facto midcareer survey.

Bonvicini’s ambitious confrontation with the viewer began well before one entered the store: A

Within the fluidly baroque form of one small sculpture, a cast-plastic jellyfish inspired by the illustrations of nineteenth-century naturalist Ernst Haeckel appears to arise from or descend onto a miniature, hand-hewn wooden replica of a 1901 Art Nouveau music stand by Alexander-Louis-Marie Charpentier. Snarled among the invertebrate’s tentacles is the wreckage of a biplane, which turns out to be that of the Italian literary figure Gabriele D’Annunzio, a World War I hero and a protofascist. One of three sculptures accompanied by a collection of works on paper in graphite and watercolor (all