Ian Hamilton Finlay, London
Swamped by a tide of fleeting tweets, it feels good to be reminded of the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, the Scottish artist and poet who made language a thing of concrete beauty. Finlay was obsessed by classical culture and ideals but not in the fusty academic sense. He mined the epics for pressing themes like sex, death and violent revolution. "Zimmerat-haunting wood nymph", reads one of his works in leafy green neon. To specialists in military history, a zimmerat's a protective coating used on second world war-era tanks, but for Finlay it becomes a magnet for the hotties of Greek myth. A selection of his sculptures are being offset by "definitions" stencilled on the wall, using his own peculiar dictionary.
Victoria Miro, N1, Thu to 1 Jun
Skye Sherwin
Rob Churm, Glasgow
Rob Churm explains the title of this exhibition, The Exhaustion Hook, thus: "The hook looks like a leminscate but it feels like a ball bearing." Clear? He deals in deliberate graphic bewilderments. A central figure of his etchings and wall drawings in Tipp-Ex and Biro is his alter ego Prame, a character who apparently dates back to Churm's zine comics The Thirteen Flashbacks Of Prame and My Visions. This would all add up to pseudo-surreal wackiness if it weren't for the artist's subtle ability to mix dreamworld doodling with compositions of geometric precision. So Death wields a bladeless scythe amid a congregation of hardly credible angels and dragons as, elsewhere, good old Prame paddles across the River Styx in a toy canoe.
Sorcha Dallas, to 27 May
Robert Clark
Young British Art, London
As an artist, Ryan Gander's known for his love of mystery and chance, peppering his sculptures, films and lectures with personal anecdotes and oddball cultural references. Here he turns curator, bringing together work by 38 young artists whose only point of connection is – in the words of the press release – that they're "exceptionally talented", and that every work selected is in black and white. The rest is left to merry happenstance. Look out for work by last year's Cartier Award winner, Simon Fujiwara, who transformed sections of the Frieze Art Fair into an archaeological dig uncovering a fantasy bisexual, amoral and thoroughly hedonistic ancient city dedicated to art. Then there's The Hut Project, a collective with a self-deprecating take on artworld conventions, as with their self-organised retrospective at the ICA a few years back, rascally titled Old Kunst.
Limoncello, E2, to 4 Jun
SS
John Salt, Birmingham
With this first retrospective, John Salt returns to his city of birth, where he was the first artist to exhibit at the Ikon in 1965. With a typically meticulous airbrush and stencil technique, Salt has painted pictures of American cars, plain and simple. Yet these on-the-road images follow the American capitalist dream as it has stretched from the cars dumped under the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge in the late-60s through to the cars abandoned outside 1990s trailer parks. It's the deadpan focus of these paintings that affords them a chill air of psychological tension reminiscent of Edward Hopper's earlier deserted cityscapes. But, unlike Hopper, Salt leaves out the protagonists.
Ikon Gallery, Wed to 17 Jul
RC
Amanda Ross-Ho, London
This LA-based artist's work is a puzzle mixing personal history with 21st-century flotsam. Her sculptural assemblages and photo collages have included such disparate items as chunks of her studio wall, her old shopping bags and cat litter. And while she also uses family photographs, the history isn't always obvious: coming from a tribe of professional snappers means these have included parental portraits and coolly close-lipped product shots. Here, a needlepoint diagram bearing the words "Time Waits For No One" is the jumping-off point.
The Approach, E2, Fri to 5 Jun
SS
The Count Of Monte Cristo, Manchester
Alexandre Dumas's 19th-century tale of unjust imprisonment, treasure hunting, role playing and revenge provides the subject for present day reflections by five contemporary artists: Annabel Dover, Hayley Lock, Cathy Lomax, Alex Pearl and Memei Thompson. The angle is pretty ironic, as a project is proposed to use Arts Council money to assassinate thousands of artistic rivals (surprise, surprise: the Arts Council declined the funding application). Posters of aristocratic heartbeats are painted with utterly swooning brushstrokes (Lord Wilmore: "As rich as a goldmine and eccentric almost to insanity.") The formal classicism of French garden design is digitally transformed into spaced-out hallucinations. Elsewhere, reproductions of aristocratic party scenes are defaced with viral rashes, and a spy camera is covertly used to investigate the V&A's collection of miniature eye jewels.
Rogue Artists' Studios & Project Space, to 6 May
RC
Norfolk & Norwich Festival
The Norfolk & Norwich Festival has a pedigree that pre-dates Glastonbury. Begun as a music fest back in the 18th century, it now runs the gamut from circus acts to ballet and theatre. Kicking off this week, it ushers in a month of stand-out exhibition openings. Highlights include Marc Camille Chaimowicz's show dedicated to Jean Genet, the gay French author beloved by the existentialists, with an unexpected connection to Norwich: Genet's fascination with rebels and petty crims took him to the city for the wedding of his lover's car-thief stepson. Later there's a show featuring Hubert Duprat's exquisite hybrids of precious gems and metals with caddis fly larvae at Nottingham Castle (14 May-29 Aug). A collaboration between man and fly, this work features larvae of just 2–3mm creating protective sheaths for themselves from gold, opals, pearls, rubies and diamonds.
Chaimowicz: The Gallery at NUCA, Fri to 21 May
SS
Kit Craig & Andrew Lim, Manchester
A complementary show of sculptural and graphic enigmas. Craig draws diagrams of contraptions seemingly designed for experiments into human perception or the inner machinations of the psyche. They tend to have mystic or mysterious titles such as Hermit's Lampshade and Holomonic Model. Lim's sculptures are precariously balanced abstract structures with titles as self-explanatory as Pressed Against One Another or as declamatory as O, OU, OUT. Together they've come up with an apt collective exhibition title: On Measuring Uncertainty.
Castlefield Gallery, to 29 May
RC
