This cross-selection of contemporary photo-art shows artists using the camera for decidedly non-documentary purposes. In many ways the exhibitors – who no doubt would define themselves as artists-with-cameras rather than photographers – tackle quite traditional subjects: still-life, landscape, the human figure. Like painters from centuries past, they enable us to look at the mundane from fresh perspectives or disorientate and reorientate banalities to form new image hybrids. At times – such as In The House Of My Father, Donald Rodney’s image of a hand holding a crumbling miniature – the camera also catches a moment of temporal vulnerability.
Manchester Art Gallery, to Jun 2013
RC
In the House of My Father, 1997, by Donald Rodney Photograph: PR
The impressionists liked to paint fast in the open air, capturing light in loose, fluttering brushwork and bonbon-sweet shades. Among these works from the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, there’s Monet’s Cliffs At Etretat, the last of the day’s sun just kissing their chalky tops. You can also hoover up the perfume in works by Tissot (pictured), or feel the evening air wafting through feathery leaves in Sisley’s Banks Of The Seine. It’s not all rural idylls, either: Renoir’s portrait of Madame Monet features embroidered flowers spilling across her gown and settee which seem fit to rival any meadow.
Royal Academy Of Arts, W1, Sat to 23 Sep SS
Chrysanthemums,1874-76, by James Tissot Photograph: PR
The infamous Chapman brothers exercise their infantile humour on the dot-to-dot innocence of a kids’ colouring book. Obviously they hardly stick to the rules, messing over the diagrammatic formations to evoke a rich array of scatological fairytales. Yet their shark-toothed teddies, Hammer horror princesses and gnomes sprouting bubonic eruptions are all rendered in the most tasteful of photo-etching techniques. The more inured we get to any semblance of affronted frisson, the more Chapmans come across as an endearing pair of art world rogues.
Sheffield Institute Of Arts, to 5 Aug
RC
My Giant Colouring Book 17, 2004, by Jake and Dinos Chapman Photograph: PR
To create his latest digital animation, John Gerrard has worked with top athletes performing manoeuvres based on those of US soldiers in Djibouti, Africa. While the former’s achievements will be broadcast for the entertainment of millions across the world at the Olympics this month, the latter have been observed through more tacit channels of communication, like satellite footage. Gerrard transforms the military exercises into a mysterious, ominous choreography, part dance, part war game, with red and blue CGI figures performing their moves in an exacting detailed copy of the Djibouti landscape. Installed in a disused power station in Oxford, this spectacle fusing military and sporting prowess is as troubling as it is breathtaking.
The Old Power Station, Sat to 29 Jul
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Work In Progress, by John Gerrard Photograph: John Gerrard
Presenting her first solo exhibition in the UK, Kelly Richardson here shows some 15 years of meticulously choreographed video imaginings. The unnerving charm of Richardson’s work derives from the fact that the viewer would be usually be hard pressed to decide whether her futuristic and post-apocalyptic video projections are of a depopulated heaven or hell. The enchanting calm of an unearthly forest is broken by a lyrebird emulating the call of a car alarm, the click of a camera shutter and gun shots. Elsewhere a stag emanates a mystic aura, a suburban scrubland is animated solely by the flicker of a street lamp, and the Romantic charm of the Lake District is bombarded by a nightmare shower of fireballs.
Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, to 29 Sep
RC
Twilight Avenger, by Kelly Richardson Photograph: PR
Two new films by Lindsay Seers and Mark Wallinger offer rather different meditations on Margate’s past. Wallinger’s Sinema Amnesia is a room-sized picture house perched on the seafront. The film inside is apparently of no more than the sea view beyond, but is in fact footage shot 24 hours previously. Seers meanwhile delivers a mix of curiosities from history and her family’s past. Her piece Entangled2 revives the cross-dressing acts of two early music hall stars, and merges their story of doubling-up with that of her great uncle who was born with heterochromia, a condition where one twin subsumes the other in the womb.
Turner Contemporary, Sat to 5 Aug
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Sinema Amnesia, 2012, by Mark Wallinger Photograph: PR
The Hepworth in Wakefield further signals its ambition to be a credible contemporary art venue with this ambitious commission of a new film from Luke Fowler: The Poor Stockringer, The Luddite Cropper And The Deluded Followers Of Joanna Southcott. Fowler’s previous works have included studies of anti-psychiatrist RD Laing and experimental composer Cornelius Cardew, both counter-cultural figures of the 1960s underground. With this film, Fowler turns his focus to the work of Marxist historian EP Thompson who, during the late-1950s, taught a subversive brand of social and literary history to adults throughout industrial towns in west Yorkshire.
The Hepworth, to 14 Oct
RC
The Poor Stockringer, The Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott, 2012, by Luke Fowler Photograph: Alan Dimmick
In his heyday he worked with Peter Sellers, George Harrison, Spike Milligan and Ken Russell, yet in the years since Bruce Lacey has been all but forgotten. He’s an inventor-cum-artist whose jerry-rigged robot-sculptures and gonzo performances could only have come from 1960s Britain. For his uniquely trippy spin on the sexual revolution, consumer boom and newly technologised life see works like The Womaniser: a prone hermaphrodite in a dentist’s chair with a thick orange sausage of a body, six arms clad in pink rubber gloves to fondle its plastic breasts, and a dummy’s head. At the same time, he seems fascinated by Britain’s fading peculiarities; the ghosts of music hall variety acts haunt his robots and comic performances.
Camden Arts Centre, NW3, Sat to 16 Sep
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R.O.S.A.B.O.S.O.M, 1966, by Bruce Lacey Photograph: Stuart Robinson
