Alice Anderson, London
Alice Anderson’s latest sculptures see her working a sort of psychoanalytic Midas touch. Her Memory Objects include things from her daily life – from a laptop to a telescope – she has had cocooned in wire that, not coincidentally, is copper like her hair. These now gleaming objects that seem a bit wrong are clearly meant to be uncanny, while the tightly spooled wire is a neat metaphor for memory’s accretions, mirroring Freud’s view of the mind as an archaeological site you can dig into. The effect, though, is curious, the uniform sheen robbing the items of their strangeness. Instead it’s all a bit high-end interior design. Yet this also seems to fit with Anderson’s psychoanalytic agenda. There’s a slightly disturbing suggestion of obsessive compulsion in all the shimmering neatness, as it erases any imperfections. She wants to get her audience in on it, too, and they can help transform a car, live in the gallery.
Wellcome Collection, NW1, Wed to 18 Oct
SS
Camille Blatrix, Llandudno
The installations of Camille Blatrix are extraordinary. It is rare that an artist comes along who immediately seems to be on to something this refreshing. The constituent elements can certainly be traced back: there are hints of the thematically restrained and technically controlled surrealistic dreams of Magritte or De Chirico, while his compositional structures owe much to a cool and clean-cut brand of minimalism. Yet, with exquisite compositional finesse, Blatrix touches on aspects of involuntary memory, existential melancholy and a yearning for something lying beyond the visible. Here, by the unusual act of sampling works made by his ceramicist mother and ex-artist father, he evokes the mysteriously formative experiences of childhood.
MOSTYN, Sat to 1 Nov
RC
At Home With Vanley Burke, Birmingham
Known as the “godfather of black British photography”, Vanley Burke is also a compulsive hoarder of multifarious cultural curiosities. Here, the Ikon takes the novel step of exhibiting a selection of his life’s photographic work alongside an installation of more or less the entire contents of the artist’s Birmingham flat. The photographs, while forming a comprehensive record of the lives of British African-Caribbean citizens over almost half a century, resist the pitfalls of stereotypical categorisation. A newsworthy record of the Handsworth riots is set against an image of kids larking about in a field. Meanwhile, despite it becoming a cliche for artists to offer up their personal archives, Burke’s installation is a disarmingly unassuming mix-up of outmoded clothes, faded snaps and one rather perky ceramic cockerel.
Ikon Gallery, Wed to 27 Sep
RC
Shirley Baker, London
From the 1960s to the 1980s, when the late Shirley Baker photographed the demolition-threatened slums of Manchester and Salford, these embattled working-class communities were far off most people’s radars. Today, looking at her witty, deeply human early images of kids and several generations of watchful matriarchs (men appear rarely) you get a unique glimpse inside a precious, vanished world. While there are plenty of broken windows along bald stone streets, the community spirit and innovative resilience to adversity is always striking. It might be a granny watching the world go by from her step, or little girls who’ve managed to turn a lamppost into a swing. Baker had a gift for visual gags, too, contrasting scrappy tykes with a stern old lady, or animals with their human chums. But as this show develops through 20 years of images, things get progressively bleaker, ending in uninhabitable landscapes of rubble.
The Photographers’ Gallery, W1, to 20 Sep
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Resource, Liverpool
While this show may centre around the idea of the gallery as a resource for audience edification, many of the works exhibited and projects staged go at it with more self-mocking wit than any assumption of artistic authority. Ian Whittlesea presents a series of visual and written instructions on how to become invisible – based on the disciplines of Rosicrucian mysticism and esoteric yoga – while Jack Brindley’s audio guide entices viewers into a tour of fictional make-believe. Perhaps that is the lot of contemporary art audiences: to act out the role of lost souls willingly led further astray.
Bluecoat, Sat to 27 Sep
RC
Rachel Howard, Hastings
Painter Rachel Howard was part of Damien Hirst’s rebel gang in the 1990s. Yet, while she’s made work reflecting on Abu Ghraib and suicide, her approach to her medium is an old-fashioned one when compared with the YBAs’ notorious shock tactics. Like abstract expressionists of the 1950s, she’s interested in how paint can convey emotional life, building up colour and varnish or degrading her surfaces with turps, in a two-step between artistic control and chaos. As with the tumultuous landscapes of 18th-century Romantics, the resulting semi-abstract vistas of pigment are springboards for awe and rapture. Her latest series, At Sea, evokes both the natural world and inner confusion. In the mix of luminous acid yellows and oranges and ghostly greys and blacks, she’s lately favoured shadowy streaks, dark lines and juddering inky squiggles suggesting watery horizons and psychological states.
Jerwood Gallery, Sat to 4 Oct
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Magali Reus, Wakefield
Magali Reus infiltrates the half-converted 19th-century mill of The Calder, opposite The Hepworth, with fabricated structures that look as if they belong to the space’s past industrial purpose, yet really have no function other than the provision of an almost perverse aesthetic allure. Forms that appear to be padlocks (pictured) lock up nothing. Manhole covers cover nothing. Multiple layers of precisely cut metal and plastic, resembling the interior networks of hi-tech soundsystems, offer not the slightest spark of electrical enlightenment. Reus is giving us a wayward take on the purist formality of modernism by mixing it in with the manners of the assembly line.
The Calder, Sat to 11 Oct
RC
