The Photographers’ Gallery’s triptych of shows demonstrates how these quite different icons of American art, literature and cinema each brought their own subversive vision to photography. Warhol’s shots, taken in his final years, capture Gay Pride parades, celebrities and bare flesh. The sinister black-and-white images of Lynch’s photos will be familiar to fans of the bleak industrial milieu that characterised his debut film, Eraserhead. Most revelatory perhaps is the junkie Beat legend Burroughs’s use of photography (pictured). His shots and kaleidoscopic collage capture a fragmented modern life and psyche as he travelled from New York to Paris to Tangiers.
The Photographers’ Gallery, W1, to 30 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Most artists who make magic out of the mundane manage it through a process of surreal disorientation. Tom Wood enables us to treasure the ordinary as it is, not weird in any way but enliveningly normal. He has deservedly been recognised for his ability to photograph the British working class without resorting to patronising cliches. This extensive exhibition – curated by the artist Mark Durden – details 40 years of him doing something comparable with landscape. Whether it’s the wildlands of County Mayo or the industrial wastelands bordering the River Mersey, Wood’s take on landscape is that nature is always utterly conditioned by human design. Thus, his landscapes are sullied by human habitation and far from the naturally pure thing of the traditional genre.
Mostyn, Sat 18 Jan to 6 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
The remote vistas in Darren Almond’s photographs seem ageless and unchanging. The same mountains captivated Romantic painters, two centuries ago. Yet Almond’s luminous images (pictured), taken in moonlight with long exposures, are no retrograde exercise in depicting landscape. Each is testament to a world altered by technology. The sky blue rivulets of the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina are those of prehistoric rock, though the colour is only visible because the ice is breaking, thanks to man’s environmental impact. Elsewhere, this impingement is conspicuous in its absence and the peaks seem hallucinogenically vivid, thanks to unusually unpolluted air. The shifting relationship of time and space is this artist’s real subject and he details how the planet has changed.
White Cube Bermondsey, SE1, Wed 22 Jan to 13 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
In the early noughties, Jemima Stehli’s photography was forthrightly feminist, exploring the camera’s voyeuristic masculine gaze by making her own naked body its subject. Here, she’s staying behind the camera, focusing on the Portuguese hardcore outfit If Lucy Fell. They’re performing at Focalpoint Gallery tonight, where Stehli will be shooting the entire set and streaming it live to a screen in Elmer Square nearby. The results will form the centrepiece of her exhibition, alongside her black-and-white images of parched grass in an arid Portuguese landscape (pictured).
Focal Point Gallery, Tue 21 Jan to 29 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Chiharu Shiota creates spaces haunted by the memories of anonymous characters, and the first of two large-scale installations here features 400 vintage suitcases suspended from the gallery ceiling by red rope. Each surface scratch and scrape is redolent of personal tales of travel, of leaving, loss and anticipated arrival. For the second installation the artist weaves a giant web of black wool in which is entangled a collection of innumerable hand-written Japanese letters. Apparently, each letter is an expression of distant thanks for love and friendship. Of course, even if one were not to know this, the letters’ script appears all the more visually poignant in our age of texts and emails.
The New Art Gallery Walsall, to 30 Mar
RC Photograph: Sunhi Mang
Silke Otto-Knapp’s latest paintings (work pictured)are all dark shadows and glinting silver ghosts. In previous series, Otto-Knapp has been inspired by dance – from the Ballets Russes to the Judson Dance Theatre – and reflected on beauty, staging and artifice. Here, the touchstone is the forest stage of pioneering modern dance choreographer Anna Halprin at her mountain home near San Francisco. Nina Canell’s sculptures, meanwhile, seem the direct opposite of Otto-Knapp’s vision of controlled ethereal beauty. Her ad hoc-looking machines typically made with DIY shop finds bring to poetic life the invisible forces that surround us.
Camden Arts Centre, NW1, to 30 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Warwick Arts Centre’s Mead Gallery continues to prove its standing as one of the most innovative visual art venues outside London with a show that justly claims to feature the most comprehensive selection of British land art ever staged. Growing out of the ecological concerns of the late 1960s, land art attempted to address our problematic relationship with nature using tropes far removed from Romantic traditions. This extensive exhibition predictably includes Andy Goldsworthy (work pictured) and Richard Long, two British artists who have come to exemplify the mode as a form of back-to-nature art rambling. But more intriguing here are works by relatively peripheral and less popular artists such as Thomas Joshua Cooper and Keith Arnatt.
Warwick Arts Centre: Mead Gallery, Sat 18 Jan to 8 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
Jamie Shovlin’s exhibition documents the filming of his mock-exploitation movie Hiker Meat. Collaborating with writer Mike Harte (of whose name Hiker Meat is an anagram) Shovlin pays tribute to the creative ingenuity of the popular genre by featuring many of its stock characters and themes: a dropout hitchhiker, a charismatic commune obsessive, liberal hints of drug use and illicit sex, all set in a 1970s American summer camp. “Thirty kids made their way to Jamestown. How many will make it back?” the publicity enticingly inquires. This is a tongue-in-cheek art world homage with the actual film consisting of a collage of over 1,500 clips sampled from original freak and slasher movies. Like many contemporary artists, Shovlin has a distinct taste for bad taste, recognising its creative potential.
Cornerhouse, Sat 18 Jan to 21 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
