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SILKE OTTO-KNAPP, 'PRESENT TIME EXERCISE' from 04-06-2009 to 13-09-2009

Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street, Oxford, 0X1 1BP, T: (+44) 01865 722 733. First major exhibition in the UK of the London-based artist Silke Otto-Knapp. Devised as a single installation for Modern Art Oxford’s Upper Gallery, the exhibition presents twelve paintings produced by Otto-Knapp between 2005 and 2009. Silke Otto-Knapp works with watercolour and gouache on canvas, repeatedly building up and dissolving the surface to create paintings of subtle effect. Drawing on a photographic archive of visual sources that refer to the spatial staging of the formal garden and the choreography of modern dance, Otto-Knapp’s tautly constructed yet mutable compositions are rendered in layers of diluted pigment and metallic silver monotones. Recent paintings reveal the artist’s evolving investigations into the construction of pictorial space with a renewed approach to the figure and colour through which more complex narratives emerge.

EMILY LANDON, KATIE MURRAY & SUSANA RODRIGUEZ, 'THE COMMUNICATION CONSIDERATION COORDINATION' from 01-07-2009 to 31-07-2009

Kate Werble Gallery, 83 Vandam Street, New York, T: (+1) 212 352 9700. Three-person group show at Kate Werble Gallery. Emily Landon's wild collection of hand-cut, hand-painted, life-size constructions of forest animals act as a playful reminder to consider the realities of what happens when animals and humans make abrupt and often surprising contact beyond the human environment. Katie Murray recently completed a new video titled 'Girls in 4/4'. Over the course of four years, Murray recorded video footage of teenage girls from a Queens, New York high school practicing and performing a step dance routine in the time signature 4/4. She used this footage to create a single, seamless audio visual performance that shows the dancers in formation using their hands and feet to communicate and perform a highly expressive, non-verbal exhibition of rhythm, strength, sight and sound. Susana Rodriguez traveled from Guadalajara, Mexico to construct an installation or "container" using a combination of sculpture, mural painting and cut vinyl to make a 3-dimensional scene incorporating the façade of the gallery. Rodriguez creates a careful coordination between the different elements and materials within the installation to visualise abstract concepts of space and time.

TANYA TRABOULSI, 'MUSIC IS LIFE: LEBANESE SOUNDS STILLS' from 01-07-2009 to 31-07-2009

Kleio Projects, 206 East 7th Street, New York. Exhibition of photographs by Beirut-based Tanya Traboulsi, entitled 'Music is Life: Lebanese Sound Stills'. Traboulsi's ongoing series, 'Music is Life', captures the Lebanese alternative music scene as it evolves both locally and internationally. Intimate, alluring and deeply personal, this body of work was born from close relationships with a small group of influential figures driving the alternative scene. Tanya has gained unprecedented access to moments in the studio, live performances as well as individual portraits. Her images celebrate the intertwining of life and art.

HANNAH COLE, 'INSTANT SUBLIME' from 01-07-2009 to 02-08-2009

Greene Contemporary, 9 Clinton Street, New York, T: (+1) 212 228 8282. Hannah Cole's work explores the distracted American state of mind. In 'Instant Sublime', she investigates the disconnection between an individual's physical presence and emotional state during a single instant in time. In the chaos of urban life, driving is one of the few remaining acts of ritual and solitude. Drawing from personal experience, Cole uses different views from inside a car as a metaphor for the relationship between interior life and the world outside. The shaped paintings are a tug of war between slow and fast pace, the mundane and the profound, and between distraction and presence. To the driver, the windshield is a screen where one watches the world pass in front of them. Inside the bubble, fleeting thoughts are triggered by visual cues from the roadside, or they unfold from interior recitations of route numbers and shopping lists. Though driving is a rare refuge of privacy and personal freedom, being "in the moment" is perpetually complicated. The car, like the mind, is always moving.

GIVE THEM WHAT THEY NEVER KNEW THEY WANTED from 01-07-2009 to 07-08-2009

Jeff Bailey Gallery, 511 West 25th Street, Suite 207, New York, T: (+1) 212 989 0156. 'Give Them What They Never Knew They Wanted' is a group exhibition featuring works by Jeff Bailey Gallery artists and a site-specific installation by guest artist Brice Brown, entitled 'Service Every Day (Dish Queen)'. With a range of works by Paolo Arao, Louise Belcourt, Sarah Brenneman, Chris Duncan, Will Duty, Jim Gaylord, Jackie Gendel, Chris Gentile, Joshua Marsh, Christian Maychack, Martin McMurray, Amy Pleasant, Julia Randall, Jon Rappleye, Michael Salter, Mark Shetabi, Mike Peter Smith, Jered Sprecher, Will Yackulic and a solo project by Brice Brown, Give Them What They Never Knew They Wanted functions as a survey exhibition, highlighting the gallery’s program. Among the paintings, drawings, photography and sculpture on view is Joshua Marsh’s oil painting, vibrating with colourful intensity, depicting a dustpan with hand-held broom. Chris Gentile’s large photograph, 'I’ve Just Seen the Rock of Ages', features a precisely arranged pile of charcoal against a stark white background. The image implies a commercial language at odds with its mysterious subject. Mark Shetabi’s sculptures function as cigar box guitars, which he will play at the opening reception.

TABLES AND CHAIRS from 01-07-2009 to 07-08-2009

D'Amelio Terras, 525 West 22nd Street, New York, T: (+1) 212 352 9460. 'Tables and Chairs' brings together nine LA-based artists (Justin Beal, Mario Correa, Kate Costello, Katie Grinnan, Aiko Hachisuka, Vishal Jugdeo, Lauren Lavitt, Allison Miller and Rebecca Morris) paired with a selection of magnetic sculptures by Alice Hutchins. The artworks all share an interest in abstraction, geometry, interaction, and dissolution.

DAUGHTERS OF THE REVOLUTION: WOMEN & COLLAGE from 02-07-2009 to 14-08-2009

Pavel Zoubok Gallery, 533 West 23rd Street, New York, T: (+1) 212 675 7490. 'Daughters of the Revolution: Women & Collage' is a survey exhibition featuring over thirty contemporary and modern artists, including Hannelore Baron, Hannah Höch, Lee Krasner, Louise Nevelson, Judy Pfaff, Martha Rosler, Anne Ryan, Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke. When Clement Greenberg wrote of the 'Pasted Paper Revolution' in his 1958 essay on Cubist collage, it is unlikely that he would or could have conceived of that revolution as being largely fought by women. Employing a wide range of visual and material strategies, each of these artists raises important questions about the unique connection between collage and women’s experience. This generally intimate art form has historically been more accessible to women, who for many years were excluded from a conventional studio practice - collage was the medium that could be done "on the kitchen table". Collage has important roots in craft traditions dominated by women (e.g. scrapbooks, 19th century Valentines, quilting, decoupage, etc.). The importance of memory and a decidedly preservationist impulse also has particular resonance for women, who are often the keepers of their family histories and mementos.

CHRIS VASELL from 02-07-2009 to 22-08-2009

Blum & Poe, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, T: (+1) 310 836 2062. In Chris Vasell's work, surface and depth are in perpetual play, a dynamic that results from his patiently laborious process. In large acrylic paintings and smaller, page-sized watercolours, he applies numerous washes of paint in successive overlays. These multiple, paper-thin layers render his canvases and works on paper at once seemingly translucent and compactly filled, as the edge-to-edge pictorial density is offset by a watery luminosity.

JEFF MCMILLAN, 'THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ISLAND' from 02-07-2009 to 23-08-2009

Peer, 99 Hoxton Street, London N1 6QL, T: (+44) 020 7739 8080. One work dominates London-based artist Jeff McMillan’s installation at Peer. A wall construction made up of nearly two hundred individually painted landscape scenes presented in a carefully ordered mass appear to migrate across two of the three gallery walls, as if attempting to envelope the space. The work is made entirely from paint-by-numbers paintings popular in North America in the 50s and 60s and acquired by McMillan over the last 15 years from thrift stores, or more recently on eBay. In the other, smaller work in this exhibition McMillan again takes a ‘found’ painting as his starting point, but these are singular pieces, one-off amateur paintings on canvas rather than a mass-produced DIY version. Through a process of pushing the canvas into a solid colour of paint, the artist literally and pictorially produces a new picture plane while obscuring some or even all of the original image. Again, notions of the sublime can apply, but this time the reference is closer to the tradition of the monochrome and colour field painting than to the aspirational majesty of the American landscape.

MINNEAPOLIS from 02-07-2009 to 29-08-2009

Peres Projects, 2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, T: (+1) 310 559 6100. Minneapolis is a city in the Midwestern United States, known for its high rate of literacy and racially tolerant atmosphere. In many respects it is the ideal American city, where coexisting cultures thrive, and in turn breed successive generations of even more creative, talented inhabitants. "Minneapolis" considers the implications of Minneapolis, its legacy and impact on everyone who has never been there. The show includes work by assume vivid astro focus, Dan Attoe, Antonio Ballester Moreno, Joe Bradley, Dan Colen, Amie Dicke, Kaye Donachie, Mark Flood, John Kleckner, Terence Koh, Bruce LaBruce, Paul Lee, Kirstine Roepstorff, Dean Sameshima, Agathe Snow, Dash Snow and Mark Titchner.

JEFF KOONS, 'POPEYE SERIES' from 02-07-2009 to 13-09-2009

Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA, T: (+44) 020 7402 6075. Exhibition of recent work by the celebrated American artist Jeff Koons, his first major exhibition in a public gallery in England. For his exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, Koons presents paintings and sculptures from his Popeye series, which he began in 2002. The works incorporate some of Koons’s signature ideas and motifs, including surreal combinations of everyday objects, cartoon imagery, art-historical references and children’s toys, and the sculptures on show continue Koons’s interest in casting inflatable toys. Those typically used by children in a swimming pool are cast in aluminium, their surfaces painted to bear an uncanny resemblance to the original objects. He juxtaposes these replica readymades with unaltered everyday objects, such as chairs or rubbish bins. The paintings are complex and layered compositions that combine disparate images both found and created by Koons, including images of the sculptures in the series.

JEFFRY MITCHELL & TIVON RICE, 'PANDA' from 02-07-2009 to 27-09-2009

Henry Art Gallery, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 15th Avenue NE & 41st Street, Seattle, T: (+1) 206 543 2280. The video 'Panda', made collaboratively by Seattle artists Jeffry Mitchell and Tivon Rice, is a recent acquisition to the Henry Art Gallery’s collection. Panda combines Mitchell’s material sensibilities with Rice’s work in experimental video into a mesmerising progression of suggestive forms and motions. The straightforward action of dripping shaving-cream onto a lit transparent surface results in a strange evolution of creatures and environments. Each dollop and plop is mirrored to evoke Rorschach inkblot tests, causing the viewer to draw his or her own subjective conclusions about the images.

INSIDE-OUT: PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION from 02-07-2009 to 29-10-2009

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 15th Avenue NE & 41st Street, Seattle, T: (+1) 206 543 2280. This exhibition contains a selection of photographs largely from the noted Monsen collection – including images by Imogen Cunningham, Patrick Faigenbaum, Nan Goldin, and others – that suggests a broad definition of portraiture. From pictures of artists’ friends and family members to formal studio portraits, the works in this exhibition assert photography’s capacity both to register a subject’s physical characteristics and hint at the complexity within. The show includes works by Imogen Cunningham, Patrick Faigenbaum, Nan Goldin, Frank A. Rinehart, Marsha Burns, Benjamin J. Falk, Samuel Montague Fassett, Jim Goldberg, David Octavius Hill, Robert Adamson, Deborah Luster, Fred E. Miller, Nicholas Nixon, Aleksandr Rodchenko and Andy Warhol.

DARREN SIWES from 04-07-2009 to 25-07-2009

Nellie Castan Gallery, Level 1, 12 River Street, South Yarra, Melbourne, T: (+61) 03 9804 7366. Darren Siwes’ haunting nocturnal photographs explore themes of philosophy, history, colonialism and indigenous identity in post-colonial times. Of Aboriginal/Dutch descent, Siwes places himself in his compositions making them in one-sense self-portraits, though it is anonymity that he is exploring. A master of the uncanny, a melancholy mood pervades all of his work, with a clear sense of loss and alienation apparent.

KATE JUST from 04-07-2009 to 25-07-2009

Nellie Castan Gallery, Level 1, 12 River Street, South Yarra, Melbourne, T: (+61) 03 9804 7366. New work by American-born, Melbourne-based artist Kate Just, who is best known for her sculptural knitting practice informed strongly by emotional and autobiographical references. Just's practice also encompasses use of collage, digital print, and video. Experiences of childhood memory, her own migration, and the garden/natural environment as an allegory for the human condition influenced Just's early works while more recent works have focused on Greek and other mythologies depicting the connection between women and nature.

LYNDALL PHELPS, 'THE PIGEON ARCHIVE' from 04-07-2009 to 30-08-2009

Milton Keynes Gallery, 900 Midsummer Boulevard, Central Milton Keynes, MK9 3QA, T: (+44) 01908 676 900. Artist Lyndall Phelps will document, through photography, video and sculpture, the re-enactment of pigeon manoeuvres undertaken during both World Wars. Procedures that inhibited or denied pigeons their natural behaviour are of particular interest to Phelps, such as the wearing of message carriers that were strapped to the body. The work will be poignant, showing the vulnerability of these birds. Large numbers lost their lives, mostly through starvation, being killed by the enemy, exposure and exhaustion.

QUIET REVOLUTION: A HAYWARD TOURING EXHIBITION from 04-07-2009 to 30-08-2009

Milton Keynes Gallery, 900 Midsummer Boulevard, Central Milton Keynes, MK9 3QA, T: (+44) 01908 676 900. This international group exhibition of lo-tech sculptural works brings together a set of artists whose practices open out a playful, exploratory relationship with familiar and unnoticed materials. These artists are not overtly interested in protest, rebellion or revolt. This is a ‘quiet revolution’, a series of open-ended experiments that sketch out different ways of approaching the world. Artists included in the exhibition are David Beattie, Margrét H. Blöndal, Alice Channer, Matt Calderwood, Hreinn Friðfinnsson, Mitzi Pederson and Joëlle Tuerlinckx.

SUSANNE NIELSEN, GANGHUT AND ROB HUNTER & JOHN LOUDEN from 04-07-2009 to 30-08-2009

Dundee Contemporary Arts, 152 Nethergate, Dundee, DD1 4DY, T: (+44) 01382 909 900. The three concurrent Summer exhibitions at Dundee Contemporary Arts are about confluence. A solo artist, a duo and a twelve member art collective have separate spaces but do all share certain sensibilities and are closely connected to the flourishing art scene in contemporary Dundee. GANGHUT are an artist collective founded upon utopian ideology, the psychology of social structures and friendship. Entitled 'Hands Across The Fire', their project for DCA promises pyrotechnics, watch towers inside and outside the gallery and a central stage area designed in collaboration with Draw Architects, Edinburgh. Susanne Nielsen has a longstanding fascination with modernist art in the first decades of the 20th Century, and is also interested in playing with the notion of classification between botany and art history. 'Red Yellow Blue' centres around a large glasshouse designed for the light filled first gallery, housing plants that Piet Mondrian drew in the early part of his career. Rob Hunter and John Louden have collaborated together for sixteen years when they were students at Edinburgh College of Art. Both born in 1972, they produced a collaborative degree show exhibition in 1994 entitled 'And So It's Goodnight From Me, And It's Goodnight From Him, Goodnight' named after the famous Two Ronnies parting shot. They have continued to work together on selected works across a range of media. Both artists produce work separately and have been mainstays in the creative art scene in Dundee for the last ten years.

ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, 'POLAROIDS' from 04-07-2009 to 13-09-2009

Modern Art Oxford, 30 Pembroke Street, Oxford, 0X1 1BP, T: (+44) 01865 722 733. This exhibition traces the early use of instant photography by the celebrated and controversial American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989). Presenting 92 of his Polaroid photographs taken between 1970 and 1975, the exhibition offers a fascinating insight into Mapplethorpe’s formative years.

BEUYS IS HERE from 04-07-2009 to 27-09-2009

De La Warr Pavilion, Marina, Bexhill on Sea, East Sussex TN40 1DP, T: (+44) 01424 229 111. German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–86) is widely recognised as one of the most influential and extraordinary artists of the twentieth century. Artist, educator, political and social activist, Beuys’s philosophy proposed the healing power and social function of art, in which everyone can participate and benefit. The exhibition is largely selected from the 'ARTIST ROOMS' collection of the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate, and brings together well-known sculptures, drawings, vitrines and a remarkable selection of posters recalling live actions and events. Works include 'Fat Chair' (1964–85) and, in Gallery 2, a single major work, 'Scala Napoletana' (1985), is shown for the first time in the UK. In addition nearly twenty notable multiples are included within the exhibition selected from National Galleries of Scotland. The multiple was a form of communication for Beuys – a means by which he could share and distribute his ideas beyond the confines of the artworld.