Exhibitionist: Becky Beasley, Omer Fast, Wu Chi-Tsung - this week's art shows in pictures

Becky Beasley: Spring Rain
The title of this exhibition, Spring Rain, is taken from a short story by the American writer Bernard Malamud. It’s a deceptively simple tale that subtlely touches on the vagaries and ambiguities of attempted communications between close friends and relations. Beasley takes this as a starting point and uses sculptures and photographs to try to inhabit the distance between what is said and what is intended. There’s a mobile cascade of tiny gherkins cast in bronze and a series of hand-tinted photographs of cucumbers presented like visceral graffiti. It’s all thoroughly tactile and touching stuff, quite capable of catalysing all manner of private – and maybe primal – instincts.
Leeds Art Gallery, to 22 Sep
RC
Photograph: PR

Omer FastOmer Fast’s films are like a hall of cracked mirrors, the antithesis of so many lushly produced documentary interviews that toy with audience sympathies. The trauma wrought by war is a big theme in this outstanding Israeli artist’s work, be it in soldiers’ messed-up memories or the stories about violence told through cinema. 5000 Feet Is The Best lifts off with a real American drone bomber, who recollects remotely targeting sites in Afghanistan and Pakistan from a Las Vegas base, over aerial footage of the gambling capital’s bright lights. This is intercut with Fast’s own creation: a harried guy in an anonymous room being questioned by an ominous figure. Is he a filmmaker? Or some sort of agent? Fast plays shrewdly with the ambiguity.
Imperial War Museum, SE1, to 29 Sep
SS Photograph: PR

Wi Chi Tsung
Taiwanese artist Wu Chi-Tsung is remarkable in his ability to adapt traditions of Chinese landscape ink painting and shadow puppetry to our contemporary world. The two installations here present visions of the manufactured and the natural. Crystal City 004 presents an architectural enchantment of constantly shifting city vistas as shadows move across the gallery walls, while Wrinkled Textures is a series of close-up studies of natural growths captured through cyanotype printing.
Chinese Art Centre, Fri to 12 Oct
RC Photograph: PR

Maud Cotter and Karl Burke" The Air They Capture Is Different
Irish artists Maud Cotter and Karl Burke infiltrate Belfast’s MAC gallery with sculptures that reflect the venue’s modernist angularity. Burke divides the interior spaces with a series of stacked and slotted-together steel structures that appear to frame the space and invest it with an atmospheric substance. Walking around his minimalistic maze, it’s hard to tell what is a sculptural portal and what is an architectural entrance or an exit. Wreathing through the space, Maud Cotter’s constructions occasionally contain more organic elements with geometric globes and amoebic pods caught up in the spindly steel furniture.
The MAC, to 13 Oct
RC Photograph: PR

Florian & Michael Quistrebert and Edward Clydesdale Thomson
French brothers Florian and Michael Quistrebert’s paintings offer a darkly seductive vision of modernism in decline. But for this duo show the brothers abandon the spooky geometry for something more expressive: canvasses doused in paint and then seemingly assaulted with a sandblaster. Meanwhile, sculptor Edward Clydesdale Thomson also possesses an interest in the future, and here he looks to the arts and crafts movement for inspiration, creating welded steel sculptures that resemble ornate garden fences.
Kunstraum, E2, Sat to 13 Sep
SS
Photograph: PR

Zoe Beloff
Sigmund Freud visited Blackpool in 1908 and apparently he was so taken with its seaside enchantments that, in the following year, on his only visit to the United States, he made a special detour to New York’s Coney Island Pleasure Park. In Zoe Beloff’s quite wonderful installation, that seems to be where the historical facts end and the creative reveries begin, as she assembles the archives of the fictional Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Blackpool Chapter. There’s the full shebang of seaside curiosities, including distorting mirrors, what-I-did-on-my-holiday slide presentations, “dream film” shows, a weathered sign announcing A World In Wax and a battered sculptural bumper-car that is cheekily titled Engine Of The Id.
Grundy Art Gallery, to 2 Nov
RC
Photograph: PR

Rachael Gomery
Plymouth art school grad Rachael Gomery was singled out at her recent degree show by the West Country collective of curators and artists Hand In Glove to create her eco-minded installation, We Are Therefore I Am. Her upended tree roots, now sprouting skyward, cast an ornate Gothic web of shadows across the gallery walls thanks to some carefully staged lighting. The effect offers an interesting take on the relationship between man and the plant life that sustains us, a subtle reminder that this beautiful spectacle of violated vegetation shares its ecosystem with us, eating up carbon monoxide and pumping out the air we breathe.
Plymouth Arts Centre, to 22 Sep
SS
Photograph: PR

Caroline Achaintre
Caroline Achaintre’s endearingly lumpy, rough-hewn ceramic heads could belong to cavemen having a carnival on the moon. There’s something very primal in the way she uses clay, shaping it intuitively to fashion misshapen bonces with bug eyes and round Os that form their mouths. They also look a bit like aliens, or perhaps escapees from planet Clanger, where language has devolved into onomatopoeic musical outbursts. Their names (Chubber, Sack Bopp and Logg Nab) suggest both sites from ancient Britain, baddies from a kids’ TV show and faraway worlds. With all that in mind, the show’s centrepiece – a shaggy tree made from the artist’s other signature material, tufted wool – could be a maypole of sorts, for these beings to dance around.
Smith’s Row, Fri to 12 Oct
SS
Photograph: PR