"A Place of Fury" by Marguerite Garth

Painful thoughts of war’s destruction flow naturally from Esther Shaw and Marguerite Garth’s scarred landscape images that are based on the harsh conditions found in local deserts. SCA Project, Pomona. To 6/5.

Turning dresses and fragments of sparkling crystal into an exploration of history and the seductive beauty and deforming power of armaments, Beverly Semmes’s installations and objects examine Annie Oakley’s legacy and its implications about power. Shoshana Wayne Gallery. To 6/10.

Denise Bartel’s subtle black and white drawings are calm meditations on the varied surfaces and textures found in dark water as it moves and reflects different qualities of light. Gallery 825. To 6/16.

Believing that drawing is always a bodily act of physical possibilities and limitations that can be used to describe the mind’s flexibility, discipline and constrictions Barbara Berk presents new work and a performance/drawing at HAUS Gallery, Pasadena. To 6/17. www.hausgallery.com

Looks like the good times might just be smoke. Rosha Yahgmai inaugurates a new Culver City gallery, Bandini-Art, by stitching fragments of old wetsuits into vibrant, rolling, flat clouds, then hanging them like deranged, fractured smoke clouds over the candle-strewn trash remaining from vanished parties. To 6/17. www.bandiniart.com

Portraits of people in costumes or makeup meant to alter their human identity look all the more strangely human in Naida Osline’s Polaroid “Captiva Collection” at The Office. To 6/23.

Kelly McLane’s dreamscape paintings of unromantic landscapes haunted by horses, rotting fish and men in sport’s-gear armor weave together fragmented thoughts of war, competitive games and the conquest of nature. Jaime Scholnick’s ink and graphite drawings strip off John Wayne’s macho-man image along with his clothes much the way women have been stripped visually in historical painting, to give us an unexpected look at various cultural myths of the masculine heroic. Angles Gallery, Santa Monica. To 6/24. www.anglesgallery.com

Playing with words by treating letters as sculptural forms Maya Schindler turns signifiers into objects and images that are doing their own thing as art with an earnest playfulness. Anna Helwing Gallery. To 6/24. www.annahelwinggallery.com

Sleek, elegantly refined sculptures that turn from one evocative shape into another mark the amazingly fresh-looking works of noted Modernist ceramicist, Ruth Duckworth. Co-curated by Thea Burger and Jo Lauria, at the Long Beach Museum of Art. To 7/2. www.lbma.org

Don’t miss the poignant and insightful new videos that are part of the Lorna Simpson exhibition at MOCA (on Grand Ave.). This important survey of her photographic-based work also features 16 of her image/text pieces that use the figure/body to look at the ways gender and culture shape relationships, expectations and interactions in our contemporary multi-racial America. To 7/10. www.moca.org

At the new downtown gallery PHARMAKA, Margaret Nielsen and Anne Hars are two of the eight artists selected by guest curators Heather Harmon and Nicole Dungao to explore the contemporary “Brave New World” collision between the human and natural worlds. Nielsen’s threatened symbolic birds are especially tender. To 7/1. www.pharmaka-art.org

A simply drawn little girl negotiating deep feelings and wild dreams has made the sensitive little drawings of Mel Kadel fascinating. She shows her narrative drawings with her husband’s at Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica. To 7/1. www.richardhellergallery.com

Using mixed media Assemblage Susan Tibbles made commissioned sculptural illustrations for political articles in the Opinion section of the L.A. Times for over 6 years. A collection of her three dimensional works share the galleries with the organic abstractions of found-object sculptures and related drawings by Coleen Sterritt at the Riverside Art Museum. To 7/2. www.riversideartmuseum.org

Carol Kaufman makes labor intensive, layered graphite drawings with the surface depth of a painting. Her drawings are paired with Sky Pape’s ink on hand-made paper drawings. Pape makes painterly lines by blowing through tubes, then cuts out the lines to create organic branching forms that suggest roots, branches and neural networks. d.e.n. contemporary. To 7/8. www.dencontemporaryart.com

The stark and powerful etchings, lithographs and woodblock prints of German artist, Kathe Kollwitz are part of the Cal State Long Beach, University Art Museum’s examination of her themes of social justice, rebellion, and families. Also included are frank and revealing images she made of her own face. 6/20 – 8/6.

The texture rich flowing bramble structures of Claire Falkenstein that float like wings and tumble like water are featured in “Structure and Flow, Works from 1950- 1980”, at Louis Stern Fine Art. To 8/26.