Mount Stuart is a spectacular neo-gothic architectural extravaganza built in the late 19th century on the Isle of Bute off the west coast of Scotland. Indulging all the romantic excesses of the gothic revival, the country house is an entangled mass of towering arches. Such spaces provide the perfect stage for 2009 Turner Prize nominee Lucy Skaer’s site-specific infiltrations. Skaer has defined the main arena of her work as “between-ness”. Her installations in unlikely places set up combinations of props to highly evocative effect. It will be intriguing to see what sculptural enigmas she comes up with for this moody setting. Past projects have seen her secreting moth and butterfly pupae in criminal courts, and half-hiding a real whale skull behind a false wall in Tate Britain.
Mount Stuart, Isle Of Bute, Sun 23 Jun to 31 Oct
RC Photograph: PR
Whether it’s arthouse or B-movies, the world of film has provided artists with an endless fount of inspiration. This exhibition curated by the gallery’s Rachel Thomas and artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (work pictured) and Cerith Wyn Evans, surveys the influence of film on the renowned likes of artists Cindy Sherman, Marcel Broodthaers and Peter Doig. Wyn Evans will stage a choral version of Samuel Beckett’s defiant play Imagination Dead Imagine, and there will be screenings of key films by directors such as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger who continue to exert a contagious creative influence.
Irish Museum Of Modern Art, Sat 22 Jun to 25 Aug
RC Photograph: PR
Elin Høyland and Caroline Wright’s works seem to hail from the edge of the world. In her film, On Tides And Fathoms, the Suffolk-based Wright mulls over the eerie emptiness of her local coastline. Her camera pans across endless shingle or lovingly lingers over the peeling paint and old wood in decrepit fisherman’s huts while local people’s stories intertwine with poetry and a moody soundtrack. The two elderly brothers in Høyland’s photographs also symbolise a lost way of life. With matching mittens, bobble hats and bushy eyebrows, they go about their daily business living off the land, watching birds and listening to radio on their family’s smallholding in remote Norway.
Smiths Row, Sat 22 Jun to 17 Aug
SS Photograph: Elin Høyland
Heather Phillipson is a poet as well as a video and performance artist, as is evident from this artfully convoluted exhibition title. Phillipson trawls the mass communication image banks of the global village and splices fragments of her findings together with specially filmed connecting threads and texts that have more to do with stream-of-consciousness free association than with the conventions of traditional film narratives or plot. A snappily titled piece called A Is To D What E Is To H is a typical collage of flickering video distortions, movie soundtracks, retro graphics and a tongue-in-cheek voiceover.
BALTIC, to 22 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
This is a chance for avant garde music buffs to geek-out on old technology and the innovations of yesteryear’s unsung pioneers. Subtitled Experiments In Art And Music In Eastern Europe, 1957-1984, it tracks three decades of cultural change, as artists and musicians looked to the future in the wake of Stalin’s demise. While magnetic tape recorders and synthesizers made an appearance in recording studios, artists attempted to shrug off the past with happenings and live art in galleries. When these two creative forces merged the results veered from playful to pointed political commentary. A break with old ways is implied in broken up and recombined vinyl records or collages of musical scores, which have a destructive energy.Other work includes self-surveillance projects and radio interventions.
Calvert 22, E2, Wed 26 Jun to 11 Aug
SS Photograph: PR
Critics don’t rate Lowry, but his depictions of an industrial landscape dominated by gloomy factories, churches and terraces, have earned him the accolade “the people’s artist”. Now the Tate is putting that reputation to the test with a summer crowd-puller of over 90 paintings, from his best-known northern urban landscapes through to later depictions of Welsh mining valleys. They’ve invited art history bigwigs Anne M Wagner and TJ Clark, famed for his work looking at painting in a sociopolitical context, to curate it. They’ve put Lowry in alongside others who tackled changing modern life such as Vincent van Gogh, Camille Pissarro and Maurice Utrillo.
Tate Britain, SE1, Wed 26 Jun to 20 Oct
SS Photograph: PR
Spaceship Unbound is a group show co-curated by the Castlefield Gallery and MadLab. The exhibition, using Margaret Atwood’s novel The Year Of The Flood as a starting point, can be viewed as a series of light-hearted accounts of “improvised” survivalist episodes such as Volkov Commanders (artists Aliya Hussain, Mariel Osborn and Anna Beam) observing the Earth’s ecological crisis from outer space dressed in Bauhaus costumes. Gallery visitors will also be roped in to generating enough bicycle power to project Sam Meech’s film Noah’s Ark, a video scrapbook re-telling of the biblical tale created entirely from footage cut from the North West Film Archive. Pictured: Rowena Hughes, Glass, 2013
Castlefield Gallery, to 28 Jul
RC Photograph: PR
Vermeer’s domestic scenes have a quiet mystery. Contemplating his light-filled rooms, you’d be forgiven for overlooking the fact that a number of his serene masterpieces depict music-making. In three of his best-known works, genteel young women pluck at guitar strings or touch the keys of virginals, sounding notes that might have delicately fallen on the ears of family – or an admirer. The National Gallery’s show, subtitled The Art Of Love And Leisure, is bringing this to life, offsetting his work with not only 17th-century instruments but with live performances by the Academy of Ancient Music. Dutch painting favoured music as a theme, as work on show by Vermeer’s contemporaries such as Pieter de Hooch and Jan Steen, demonstrates.
National Gallery, WC2, Wed 26 Jun to 8 Sep
SS Photograph: PR
