Tom Ormond dreams big in his paintings of fantasy architecture. Luminous geometric steeples, huge domes and satellite dishes tilting towards stormy heavens, the images wouldn’t seem out of place on the jacket of a science fiction novel.Ormond’s structures, however, always have a half-formed look. Their building blocks are as visible as pixels, as if they were either just collapsing or self-assembling before our eyes. But wood and stone are worked in with the neon, suggesting a grittiness beneath the high-tech first impression. Tatlin’s Tower, the Soviet architect’s unrealised helter-skelter monument to revolution, is a ghost at the feast. Yet Ormond’s paintings hint at timeless human struggles.
Charlie Smith, EC1, Fri to 5 Oct
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Photograph: PR
Sculptors Nicola Kirkaldy and Iede Reckman use the geometric principles of illusion as a basis for this large-scale installation that aims to captivate, trick and enchant the eye. Kirkaldy’s visual vocabulary (work pictured) tends to consist of relief circles and clusters of globes, often painted in primary colours that in themselves seem to push and pull the viewer’s perception of 3D space. Reckman slices up the air with angled timber frames and stacked lozenges that obliquely converge lines of perspective. Slotted together, these collaborative bodies of work conjure a kind of make-believe interior landscape that’s as undeniably real as it is virtually abstract.
CCA, Sat to 13 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
Psychic Driving is a set of contemporary video installations concerned with terror, sci-fi, eroticism and violence that have got out of hand, sometimes amusingly and sometimes unnervingly so. A short film by Jeanne Susplugas shows a female figure breathing haltingly as she awakes fitfully to find herself in a bath of antidepressant pills that shift around her naked figure like medicinal maggots, while Nicolas Provost’s video uses the digital technique of datamoshing to warp footage taken from B-movie horror films into sequences of metamorphic monsters. Like a more high-tech version of a fairground house of horrors ride, Psychic Driving takes us on a thoroughly enjoyable bad trip. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Golden Thread Gallery, to 5 Oct
RC Photograph: PR
Like this week’s young Brit, Tom Price, German sculptor Stephan Balkenhol has made a career out of revamping traditional figurative sculpture. He first hit it big in the 90s with his everymen and women fashioned not from luxurious bronze but lowly wood, sliced into human shapes with a chainsaw. His figures are serenely mute, wearing calm, inscrutable expressions. While they apparently aim for the universal, an unfinished or incomplete quality hints at the limits of what art can show.
Stephen Friedman Gallery, Wed to 5 Oct
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Photograph: Stephan Balkenhol/PR
Doug Fishbone gathers together a renowned coterie of contributors including David Shrigley, Jonathan Allen, Gary Webb and star jokers Jake & Dinos Chapman to construct a culturally irreverent crazy golf course. There are glimmers of semi-serious political subversion and wry social commentary, with holes featuring toppled dictators, a cut-price Garden of Eden, a sign reading “Do Not Covet Your Neighbour’s Ball And Club”, and a life-size model of a bent-over bloke with his pants down. No prizes for guessing where the hole is in that one.
QUAD, Sat to 15 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
For The Hepworth’s inaugural show at its Calder Gallery, a vast contemporary art space newly converted from the shell of a 19th-century mill, Roger Hiorns will be exhibiting his entire Youth Series for the first time. Various props – a wrecked car engine, a clinical stainless steel table, the insides of a military jet – are dumped on the gallery floor and brought to life by the silent presence of lone youngsters selected from local colleges. The raw vulnerability of the youths, who crucially are all naked, is set in stark contrast to the unyielding surfaces of the manufactured found objects.
The Hepworth, to 3 Nov
RC Photograph: PR
You don’t get many nine-foot figurative bronzes in contemporary art. Tom Price’s depicts a young black man staring introspectively at his mobile phone. Entitled Network, it’s a monument of sorts to our era where so-called connectivity can make us more disconnected from the outside world than ever. Complimenting this towering centrepiece, an intricately detailed smaller work wittily recasts a 14th-century bronze of Samson and the Philistine as a contemporary street brawl, with a woman going for a bloke with a high-heeled shoe in hand.
Hales Gallery, E1, Fri to 12 Oct
SS Photograph: PR
