NOW SHOWING #172: The week’s top exhibitions

Dark Geometries, Coleman Projects, London
A group show of painting, sculpture, film, sound and performance by Seth Ayyaz, Nancy Milner, Gill Ord and Emily Speed. Borne out of conversations between Milner, Ord and Speed, who met at The British School at Rome in 2014, the exhibition is a response to the space at Coleman Projects in Bermondsey. The four artists explore shared interests in architectural forms and the reverberative play of sound and colour; each work is to be considered a node within an underlying matrix of relations.
Until 27 November 2016. www.colemanprojects.org.uk

Urban Photographers Association (UPA) Annual Exhibition, Lewisham Arthouse, London
An exhibition of selected work from UPA members responding to the theme ‘Photography, Memory and Archive’ – part of UrbanPhotoFest 2016. Cities are not merely architectural metaphors; they are mobile, evolving entities projecting memories deep into the social life of urban dwellers. Through a variety of visual projects the exhibition asks: in what way can urban photography break down social stereotypes and offer alternative ocular archives of such places?
Until 12 November 2016. www.urbanphotographers.org

Triumph of Zero, VoidoidARCHIVE, Glasgow
A group show of work by Dennis & Debbie Club, Erica Eyres, Beagles & Ramsay, John Russell, and Andy Warhol, in a space in the railway arches near to Glasgow artist Jim Lambie’s The Poetry Club. The VoidoidArchive has been exhibiting Glasgow-based, as well as national and international artists, since 2012. The gallery often shows work by graduates from Glasgow School of Art, particularly artists who have completed the school’s MFA programme.
Until 13 November 2016. www.voidoidarchive.com

Alistair Frost, Backlit, Nottingham
A body of new paintings by Alistair Frost, produced in his rural Gloucestershire studio over the past two years. The exhibition marks a new direction in Frost’s practice, showing a more formal approach to painting, creating work that asks visitors to look twice at familiar and overfamiliar images. Frost has also created a large-scale wall mural in collaboration with Backlit studio artists, and has devised an ‘analogue’ interactive version of a fruit machine.
Until 9 December 2016. backlit.org.uk

Candice Lin: A Body Reduced to Brilliant Colour, Gasworks, London
The artist’s first solo show in the UK, A Body Reduced to Brilliant Colour explores how histories of slavery and colonialism have been shaped by human attraction to colours, tastes, textures and drugs. Focusing on how the desire to wear, ingest or become enraptured by certain substances preceded the will to trade them as commercial goods, the exhibition traces the materialist urges at the root of colonial violence. Living processes, from fermentation to the generation of an electrical current through bacterial digestion, join with objects, organic matter and DIY mechanics to constitute a ritualistic act.
Until 11 December 2016. www.gasworks.org.uk

Images:
1. Emily Speed, Façades/Flats, 2012
2. David Colm Killeen, Urban Photographers Association
3. Erica Eyres, Clay Paper Bag, 2014, fired stoneware.
4. Alistair Frost, untitled painting, 2016, exhibited at Backlit, Nottingham.
5. Candice Lin, System for a Stain, 2016, mixed media, dimensions variable, Gasworks, London. Courtesy the artist and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles

More on a-n.co.uk: