Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 2015, London
Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that a sense of melancholia runs through the work of the three winners of the Jerwood/Photoworks awards. Matthew Finn’s portraits of his mother at home are tender to a point but far from saccharine. They portray a sense of vulnerability – on occasions she looks lost and drawn despite her cosy domestic setting. The trust that the subject puts into her documenter is testament to the closeness of their relationship, and it is this that lends the images their power. Tereza Zelenkova and Joanna Piotrowska’s work is more staged. The latter arranges two blankly mournful human subjects into intimate positions, as if a moment of dance has been captured and rendered inanimate. Like Zelenkova’s poignant still lifes, these images are full of delicate symbolism that remains beyond easy intuition.
Jerwood Space, SE1, Wed to 13 Dec
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Crab Walk, Sunderland
Crab Walk is a translation of the German phrase krebsgang, coined by novelist Günter Grass to express the need to look backward in order to move forward. Inspiration for the show comes from the present state of Malevich’s century-old abstract Black Square; the once immaculate masterpiece is now a filigree of minute cracks. So a gathering of contemporary artists – including Nicolas Deshayes, Philomene Pirecki and Sally Troughton – are staging this show of abstractions that reflect on historic uncertainties. Archives are unearthed to set the scene; sculpture, painting and film are produced, reproduced and intermixed to reorientate their individual impact.
Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, to 20 Feb
RC
Model Behaviour, Manchester
This exhibition proposes that adult model-making can enable a profound form of psychic play. Moving on from dolls’ houses and sandcastles, six artists create models in order to have their own make-believe way with the world. Looped film clips are presented by Oliver Boberg, lit with electric blue high contrast, like crime scenes paused forever in spot-lit suspense. James Casebere builds and immaculately photographs mini-sculptural mock-ups of the backstreets of Dutchess County in upstate New York. Throughout, miniature scale signals childhood memories, and architectural details are sampled as dream stage-sets. By the time we get round to Luisa Lambri’s intimate photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin Martin House, we are charmed into a deja vu of some other temporal reality.
RC
House Of Life (A Collage), St Leonards-on-Sea
Written in 1965 by art critic Mario Praz, The House Of Life is a delirious tour of the writer’s Rome residence and is part memoir and part study of interior design. The two are, of course, mutually intertwined; even in the Ikea era, our personalities still happily percolate through the stuff we choose to live with. Taking cues from Praz’s text and curated by Becky Beasley, an artist who in her own work draws our attention to the way in which houses become homes, the show brings together the work of five further artists, among them John Stezaker and Marc Camille Chaimowicz.
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William Hunt, Cork
In the past, London artist William Hunt’s outlandish antic-art has demanded he strums a guitar while held upside down with his head submerged in a bucket. Here, the first of two video installations, A Moment’s Hesitation, initially appears to feature a promotional interview sensibly examining the artist’s art agenda. It gradually becomes evident, though, that the interviewer is Hunt’s wife, concerned since the birth of their child about the risks involved in such impulsive means of bringing home the bacon. A seemingly defiant Hunt follows this, in Still Yourself And Calm Your Boots, with a crash stunt in which he ups the ante in the daft-and-dangerous stakes. He drives a car packed with himself and 65 litres of white paint into a concrete wall at speed, before emerging in a shower of silver confetti and proceeding to croon a song about the delightful irony of “staging” such an “accident”.
Crawford Art Gallery, to 20 Feb
RC
Alighiero Boetti, London
Anyone with a passing knowledge of arte povera (the mid-20th century movement that valued everyday materials) will be familiar with Boetti’s Mappa works of the 1970s. Embroidered world maps, in which each country is stitched with the design of the respective national flag, their production was outsourced to a group of women in Kabul. Yet this exhibition shows just how diverse the Italian artist’s output was. Taken from a single private collection, the show demonstrates Boetti’s fascination with both systems and abstraction. Highlights include a text painting in which all the words have been removed, leaving only punctuation; one of the first uses of photocopying in art; and a grid of wood blocks, engraved with various symbols, which are only able to fit inside their tray in one mysterious arrangement.
Luxembourg & Dayan, W1, to 12 Dec
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Luke Fowler And Mark Fell, London
To The Editor Of Amateur Photographer saw video artist Luke Fowler and musician Mark Fell dig deep into the archives of Pavilion, Britain’s first feminist photography centre. That film also contained myriad references to the politically conscious dance music that was coming out of northern musical powerhouses in the 1980s, and the duo return to this in a new body of work. In a series of films and live events they draw historical resonance from two early computer programming languages that were developed for making music but have since been made redundant by more sophisticated software.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, to 7 Feb
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