Paul Reas returns to his hometown and presents a retrospective of documentary photographs covering the last 30 years; from Thatcherism through to the present day. Reas has an eye for themes that reveal a prevailing air of social disillusionment and cultural vacuity. As traditional industry disappears, we see the emergence of assembly-line technologies. The architectural identity of towns dissolve to make way for out-of-town shopping malls. Heritage-industry theme parks indulge in a politically dubious nostalgia as the London property boom explodes. On the face of it it’s unrelentingly grim. Yet Reas populates such scenes with real characters, replete with poker-faced humour and shrugging defiance. Rees presents an existence that is in many ways so very English; downtrodden yet far from down and out.
Impressions Gallery, to 8 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
Edward Chell’s urban nature studies sit alongside a selection of work by his peers that all riff on the theme of Soft Estate, a term coined by the Highways Agency for the “natural” habitats that have evolved along the edges of motorways and dual carriageways. Cell’s silhouette paintings of wasteland plant life, such as Creeping Thistle (pictured), hark ironically back to the 18th-century Romantic taste for the picturesque. But it’s one of the other invited artists, John Darwell, who focuses our attention in uncomfortable close-up on the most telling details of suburban landscapes. Darwell’s photographs were taken while walking around the outskirts of Carlisle and his still-life-like studies reveal crushed beer cans, dolls’ heads and a beautiful array of tied plastic bags filled with dog muck.
The Bluecoat, to 23 Feb
RC Photograph: Peter Abrahams
Night is a place for all things irrational, hidden or subversive in this spooky show, featuring work by 22 international artists. It’s the place where bogeymen lurk, like in Dan Treacy’s Them, a disturbing series of barely lit black-and-white portraits exploring our fear of the “other”. There are also bronze monsters and spectral drawings of entangled bodies, but Anthony Goicolea explores night as a place of youthful freedom in his video in which torch-bearing teens romp through nocturnal woods. Similarly, Michael Palm and Willi Dorner (work pictured) follow kids capering through the streets and piling up their bodies to make living, stacked sculptures.
Chapter Gallery, Fri 13 Dec to 2 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Social mobility is under scrutiny by Johann Arens as he salvages the remains of Habesha Grocery, a recently closed-down East End internet cafe and corner shop. This includes the old PCs (pictured) used by anyone without a home computer or smartphone in an area now colonised by galleries, organic bakeries and bars. With this juxtaposition of haves and have nots, Arens points the finger at both gentrification and cyberspace, supposedly free and open, and reminds those of us who take it for granted that information comes at a price.
Paradise Row, W1, Fri 13 Dec to 1 Feb
SS Photograph: PR
Clay might be the most primal medium, but it’s also one of the most enduring. This exhibition spans over a century’s worth of artists who’ve looked at the potter’s age-old craft afresh. At one end there’s Bernard Leach, the godfather of studio pottery, who studied with a court potter in Japan before establishing his base in St Ives. At the other end of the spectrum, pottery has lost none of its sheen for contemporary artists such as Gideon Rubin (work pictured) and Jessica Jackson Hutchins, whose work has a very human appeal, or Jesse Wine and her abstract ceramics, which sport psychedelic glazes.
Rokeby, EC1, Mon 16 Dec to 7 Mar
SS Photograph: Shira Klasmer
Wolfgang Weileder’s Atlas is a series of large-scale digital prints that, although apparently abstract, represent a meticulous recording of the comings and goings of central city squares, plazas and piazzas the world over. Using a specially designed computer program, the artist samples digital photographic “slices” of the cities’ complex movements through a full morning or afternoon of shifting daylight. The results are images that have a distinct architectural edge.
Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, to 8 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
V.02 Gravity is an example of what has become known within the art world as an “immersive” installation. Here, the gallery visitor is no longer merely a viewer, but more of an active participant in a multimedia work that invites you to become somehow intermixed in a thoroughly spaced-out spectacle. The show has been conceived by digital artists Aron Brown, Oli Melia and Rob Newman, who have been working alongside Aaron Bradbury, and constructed in collaboration with a range of creatives, including a dubstep composer, a tabla player and various high-tech wizards.
Derby QUAD, Sat 14 Dec to 23 Feb
RC
Photograph: Aaron Bradbury
Consumer culture is presented as one long dispiriting loop-the-loop through self-deception and absurd aspirations in Kosovan artist Sislej Xhafa’s forthright, bleakly witty UK solo debut. Xhafa’s Merry Go Round is a battered football goalpost from which a strange gang of consumer objects hang. There’s a fridge, some fags, a radio and a taxidermy cat, which is lifeless, imperfectly preserved and particularly jarring. Consumerism’s inability to overcome death is the subject of another sculpture where a phone sits atop a tombstone like a bad joke on the timeless human desire to communicate with spirits. Meanwhile, the gap between the insatiable dreams consumerism plays on and reality is evoked in the painting Woman In A Red Dress (pictured), where a smudgy grey woman cavorts, without a hint of scarlet.
Blain/Southern, W1, Fri 13 Dec to 25 Jan
SS Photograph: PR
