Exhibitions preview (original) (raw)

Anthony Shapland
Cardiff

The videos of Antony Shapland's Suddenly After A Long Silence capture in-between moments and out-of-the-way places. Oscillating uneasily between documentary fragments and fictional enactments, they hint at significance where none is overtly apparent. A CCTV camera, focused for no obvious reason on a doorway, captures men furtively urinating and hen night bunny girls just passing by. A film crew is itself filmed as it tries to record a false dawn and the staged singing of a caged canary. A Christmas tree, dumped on a roadside and suddenly bursting into flames, is a cryptic image of oblique displacement and unresolved suspense. The exhibition publicity quotes from Jon McGregor's entrancing novel If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things, and there are similar hints of the underlying poignancy of everyday occurrences.
Robert Clark

· Chapter Gallery, Sat 8 to Oct 21

Sebastian Horsley
London

OK, so let's recap. In 2000, Sebastian Horsley, in a drastic attempt for artistic credibility, went to the Philippines and had himself crucified. Now, there are other ways of getting your art written about, but perhaps Horsley was out of champagne and Benzedrine that week. Anyway, it had the desired effect and he even got on TV. But before we consider the ramifications of Horsley's selfless act (was it our salvation from Big Brother or DIY disaster shows?), we must ask where the artist can go from here. Well Hookers, Dealers, Tailors should provide us with the answer. This retrospective includes our Horsley diving into shark-infested waters in Australia and taking a lethal cocktail of drugs. He's the art world's very own Bear Grylls, and so much more entertaining than the lifeless David Blaine.
Jessica Lack

· Spectrum, W1, to Oct 1

Donald Urquhart
London

Donald Urquhart's art is fueled by alcohol. In the past, he has recorded the ramblings of drunks in surreal black and white cartoon sketches and celebrated the reckless antics of inebriated partygoers. But it's not so much the declarations of the booze hound that interest him as the illicit world that alcohol inhabits - the cabaret bars, drag and strip clubs. Urquhart knew Leigh Bowery, which explains something of the icy gothic charm of his art. His Alphabet Of Bad Luck, Doom And Horror was a childlike frieze, illustrating the letters of the alphabet with descriptions like P is for poison, R is for rabies and J is for judgment day. Nominated for Beck's Futures in 2005, for which he invented a new scent that smelt distinctly of chardonnay, Urquhart's new exhibition of work will continue to be a drink drive through hedonistic territory.
JL

· Maureen Paley, E2, to Sep 30

Damián Ortega
Birmingham

The Mexican artist Damián Ortega shot to international infamy at the 2003 Venice Biennale by the simple tactic of dismantling a Volkswagen Beetle and suspending it piece by piece from the gallery ceiling. The installation, titled Cosmic Thing, was typical of his ability to create wonderfully imposing sculptural phenomena through the most deceptively simple technical interventions. Here, in an installation with the comparably grandiose title of Being, he has fashioned a 5m tower and a sprawling labyrinth from coiled industrial copper salvaged from the declining industry of the area around Ikon's Eastside annexe site. In the vast Eastside gallery, the piece comes across with a kind of post industrial grandeur, as if copper's associations as a conductor of energy has itself somehow metamorphosed the raw material into a petrified embodiment of sculptural energy.
RC

· Ikon Eastside, to Oct 20

Eva Rothschild
London

Eva Rothschild has had a stellar career. Born in 1972, she studied in Belfast before completing her MA at Goldsmiths in 1999. Shows at The Modern Institute in Glasgow and The Showroom in London followed and by 2002 she was being described as one of the finest young sculptors in Britain. Her early works, combining Perspex, vinyl and new age imagery, were reminiscient of a teenage goth's bedroom, but then they got a bit kinkier, and the sleazy world of Soho seemed more fitting. In her new solo show she continues using the same materials, creating sculptures out of strips of vinyl and leather and plastic tubing.
JL

· South London Gallery, SE5, Thu 13 to Nov 4

Michelle Johnson
Manchester

Artist Heidi Schaefer's twenty+3 projects gallery is run with utter conviction and a thoroughly convincing international programme in the converted front room of her terraced house. Here features Mustard And Ketchup, the first UK solo show from Canadian Michelle Johnson. A digital print of an apocalyptic flood looks all too familiar from recent UK weather. Then there's a cheeky adaptation of a Ronald McDonald figure, dissolved from a cheering commercial emblem into a disintegrating mess gone out of contol.
RC

· twenty+3 projects, Sat 8 to Oct 6

Offload Festival
Bristol

Artists join the green debate this weekend, with the first media and arts festival focusing on nature, sustainability and ecology. Subtitled Systems For Survival, the event invites artists to come up with, among other things, ideas for a post-oil world. There will be bike rides courtesy of the live performance group Polar Produce, who are organising the festival, and Feral Trade find new bartering routes through the urban jungle, shunning the supermarkets for a collection of artist mules. Based in a disused tobacco factory in Cumberland Basin, the festival promises inventive and witty solutions to the global crisis.
JL

· Various venues, Thu 13 to Sep 16

Pak Keung Wan
Kettering

Pak Keung Wan has produced some of the most sensitive and charismatic art around. His drawings are exquisite elliptical universes. Neither purely abstract nor recognisably figurative, each image is testimony to its own meticulously controlled yet almost playfully improvised process of creation. Wan's contemplative ritualised creativity also comes in the form of an installation, mounted in the gallery's converted water tower, that traces the organic formations of his breathing. This is art of rare individualistic charm, quivering on the edge of pictorial silence yet speaking more resonantly than all the declamatory attention seeking of the art fair artworld.
RC

· Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, Thu 13 to Oct 28