Although artists have lived in cities for centuries, art has never fully come to terms with the urban landscape. This exhibition takes on both the loneliness and alienation of the street as well as its promise of escape from the predictabilities of domestic safety. Yet, tellingly, while some of the more effective work here is in photography, it’s haunted by the history of painting. The Algerian photo-artist Mohamed Bourouissa’s images of the Parisian banlieue high-rise housing estates appear to be documentaries but are in fact painstakingly posed tableaux based on classical paintings. In contrast, Miao Xiaochun’s Orbit is a digitised photographic reinterpretation of the Chinese scroll painting tradition of sandian toushi.
The New Art Gallery, to 15 Sep
RC
Storyteller (2010), by Nicolas Provost Photograph: PR
Andrew Miller’s exhibition Dusk Or Dawn typically concerns itself with moments of suspense, in-between places, inter-zones of experiential and artistic uncertainty. Shifting between drawing, sculpture, photography and site-specific installation, Miller constructs unresolved spectacles. His installation You, Me, Something Else, with its canopy of bunting assembled from scraps of secondhand clothing, sets the stage of a celebration of God knows what. One cannot but suspect that the artist is having a wry dig at our year of Jubilee and Olympic razzmatazz, but it’s less a cynical work than a somewhat sad one.
Baltic 39, to 7 Oct
RC
You Me, Something Else (2012), by Andrew Miller Photograph: Colin Davison
“Legacy” is the buzzword of the Olympics, and for the residents of the Clays Lane housing co-operative – knocked down to make way for the Olympic park – the impact of the Games is already keenly felt. Artist Adelita Husni-Bey has spent the past four years working with the estate’s evictees to record the history of a place the urban planners would rather forget. As this exhibition reveals, since its creation in the idealistic 1970s, Clays Lane was a close community with a motley creative life. Filmed interviews with former residents, a play (staged at Bethnal Green Library) and even a brick-by-brick summation of its buildings’ physical properties build a lively portrait of a lost world.
Supplement Gallery and various venues, E2, Sat to 19 Aug
SS Photograph: Adelita Husni-Bey
Gabriel Birch and Sophie Yetton look like they’ve dismantled chairs, easels and plywood walls to build their pavilion, an alternative take on cinema auditoria. It’s a rickety patchwork ramp of thin wood panels ascending on sticks, like a ski run on a climbing frame. The duo’s pavilion is providing a haphazard jigsaw puzzle of wooden seating on which to view a programme of films by six young artists, and should provide the perfect foil to works such as Helene Kazan’s stop-motion animation made from a single photo of a flooded house and Thomas Lock’s film of a desolate East End children’s hospital.
Dilston Grove, SE16, Sat to 26 Aug
SS Photograph: PR
The enterprising Tarpey Gallery launches its annual Platform series, conceived to give some deserved exposure to recent graduates, with this show of 3D works that play reflectively on traditions and conventions of sculpture. Krystina Naylor has said that “either the object itself or its situation should feel slightly odd.” She tricks the eye into perceiving solid objects and empty spaces where there are only flat surfaces coated with what she has called “collage skin”. Alongside, the basic engineering paraphernalia of clamps, rulers and spirit levels form the building blocks of Christopher Brooke’s sculptural assemblages – self-portraits of sculptures rather than sculptors.
Tarpey Gallery, to 1 Sep
RC
Rulers, Clamps, Spirit Levels, by Christopher Brooke Photograph: PR
After the most renowned staging of Samuel Beckett’s Not I in 1973, its sole performer Billie Whitelaw was moved to state, “I defy anyone to come up with a more intense theatrical experience.” Well, with this filmed piece, director Neil Jordan and actress Julianne Moore bravely take up the challenge. Jordan follows Beckett’s direction to spotlight only the performer’s mouth as she delivers a distressing stream-of-consciousness monologue, but in an inventive new twist he films the minimal action from multiple cameras and stages an installation of six screen projections arranged in a circle. An intrepid tribute to an original work that is so great it’s scary.
IMMA The Annex, to 9 SepRC
Not I (2000), by Neil Jordan Photograph: PR
The thin gauzy sprays and crusty blobs of colour in Daniel Pasteiner’s most recent paintings might call to mind Jackson Pollock, while the blocky geometric forms and kitschy rainbows conjure constructivism or pop. Rarely, though, does this young artist actually use paint itself. His canvases are the little pound shop variety, their cellophane binding still in place. Beneath this plastic skin Pasteiner creates his gorgeous compositions with everything from fake snow to bits of fungus-coated popcorn. Whatever sadness might lurk in these mouldering after-images of painting’s previous greats is quickly banished by this witty, free-thinking approach to materials. Then there are Pasteiner’s conventional works: large abstract canvases inspired by the serpentine coils of Scalextric racetracks.
ANDOR, E2, to 30 Sep
SS Photograph: PR
Nature is anything but bucolic in Rachael Champion’s sculptures and installations. Verdant green stalks sprout from blue plastic bags like islands in pools of chlorine. They flourish beneath many-sunned skies – or rather grids of grow-lamps. Grass is served up in boxes like cake. The red-gold or purple-flowered plants that add a note of wildness to the giant green plastic water containers they surround are actually cash crops, like buckwheat, barley or forage rape, grown for subsistence and profit. This recent Royal Academy School graduate’s conflations of ecology, architecture and industrial kit point up a farming industry that’s tightly controlled and technologised. Yet this alien landscape is very much rooted in the here and now.
Modern Art Oxford, to 16 Sep
SS
Dual Spectrum Subsistence (2012), by Rachael Champion Photograph: Tila Rodriguez Past
