Matt Calderwood has developed a reputation by assembling familiar objects and materials into strikingly precarious and gravity-defying sculptural structures. One welded steel piece is to be installed on the BALTIC 39 roof, so the north-east’s weather will add another level of erosive menace to its aesthetic composure. A shaman of the workaday world, Calderwood stages tableaux in which the most earthbound and banal of objects take on an almost otherworldly grace. They’re like props from an enchanting dream of what goes on behind the closed doors of Homebase when no one’s around and all the DIY paraphernalia decides to stage some kind of balletic get-together.
BALTIC 39, to 23 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
Derby is occupied by photography again for the sixth Format festival. The ambition and reach remains international but the focus is more local than usual, reflecting the event’s theme and subtitle, Factory. The central exhibition of the festival is Still Waters (QUAD and Derby Museum And Art Gallery), a series of portraits of local dignitaries by Brian Griffin. The images have a posed grandeur, more reminiscent of formal portraits by the 18th-century painter Joseph Wright of Derby than the hurried and quickly deleted snaps of our digital age. Look out too for Notes Home (Derby Museum And Art Gallery) – selected from Timothy Prus and Ed Jones’s Archive Of Modern Conflict, it’s a display of postcards sent home from resorts such as Blackpool and Morecambe throughout the 20th centur.
Various venues, to 7 Apr
RC Photograph: Brian Griffin
Richard Hughes’s sculptures might look old and tarnished, but magic is in store for those who dig deeper. Drawing on memories of his drab teenhood in 1980s suburban Birmingham, he takes stuff that has been banished from sight, abandoned or forgotten and makes it buzz with fantastical escapism. His recent efforts at Glasgow’s Tramway, from which this exhibition is developed, include turning an entire prefab community centre on its side. Humphrey Spender’s photographs documenting East End family life in the 1930s make a great accompaniment.
First Site, Sat 15 Mar to 12 May
SS Photograph: PR
This historical survey of the pop promo had to include classics such as Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. However, a more political edge is provided by groups ranging from super-establishment hippies Pink Floyd through to the Russian punk-feminist collective Pussy Riot; and among the show’s more unpredictable moments is I’m A Victim Of This Song, a 1995 video version of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game, re-sung by psychedelic visual artist Charlotte “Pipilotti” Rist.
FACT, to 26 May
RC Photograph: PR
Artists who win the Max Mara Art Prize for Women get a six-month residency in Italy. What 2012 laureate Laure Prouvost would wring from this was always going to be interesting. The French, London-based artist’s dizzying video installations hinge on what’s lost – or rather gained – in translation. Text flashes past on screen with words misspelt or playfully misconceived, while sentences counteract or strangely complement what we see and hear. Inspired by the long tradition of artistic responses to travelling to the Med, Prouvost explores pleasure, with a delicious derangement of sense and the senses. Her two-part installation features luscious broken fruit and golden pineapples set to a soundtrack of gentle breathing.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, Wed 20 Mar to 7 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
The LA-based sculptor Sterling Ruby has been big news in the American art world for a while. His first UK solo show since 2008, by turns plump and smooth, gunky and junky, establishes why. Whether he’s working with soft furnishings or poured urethane, there’s a visceral, psycho-sexual charge to his work that cuts deep. His recent ceramics resemble innards, their repeatedly fired, blackened surfaces offset a gluey, gorgeous glaze. Meanwhile, the huge, scarlet-tipped, poured urethane creations resembling guts-soaked missiles that first made his name in 2008 have been reimagined here, tipped sideways and doused in red, white and blue. Monsters and vampire mouths made from cheap blankets with a stars-and-stripes pattern continue the critique of US imperialism.
Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row, W1, Fri 22 Mar to 4 May
SS Photograph: Robert Wedemeyer
Yoshua Okón’s video installation Octopus takes its name from the nickname given in Guatemala to the USA’s exploitative United Fruit Company, which, in reaction to the nationalisation of farm assets, requested the CIA-led overthrow of the country’s president, an event that led to a 36-year civil war. Okón’s video follows LA’s Mayan community as they take a break from queuing for labouring work in a parking lot to re-enact episodes from the war. In the US tradition of military re-enactments, the performance is amateurish, with the actors pointing fingers instead of guns.
Cornerhouse, to 1 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
Julia Wachtel’s paintings act as sharp satire of the vapid side of American life. For three decades she’s explored the smooth world of advertising and TV. Yet, unlike contemporaries such as Richard Prince or Jeff Koons, her work has a direct politicised kick, as this debut UK show reveals. Works from the 80s feature cartoon characters – leering babies and other goggle-eyed grotesques – lifted from greetings cards and set next to screen-printed news images chronicling a world in decline. In a later series of images, people who spill their guts on confessional chatshows are turned into bullet-points of fake emotion, painted with their faces cropped and in close-up, while clothes and skin are colour-coded to match long strips of colour taken from chainstore branding.
Vilma Gold, E2, Sat 15 Mar to 13 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
