The title of Charles Avery’s show – The People And Things Of Onomatopoeia – refers to the port town of his very own make-believe island. At Edinburgh’s nearby Waverley Station he has installed a bronze tree from the Jadindagadendar, which, according to the artist, is the municipal park of Onomatopoeia. You get the picture: Avery deals in worlds within worlds, whose narrative density is as convoluted as their names are strange. It’s as if William Burroughs has been reborn as a super-introverted adolescent whose feverish imaginings include metamorphic beasts, grotesque humanoids and teenagers sporting T-shirts bearing slogans such as We Don’t Stay Here Because Of Gravity We Stay Because We Like It. Avery dreams it all up as he goes along, mostly in drawings restrained by a rather pedestrian technique.  Ingleby Gallery, Thursday 30 July to Saturday 3 October  Not so long ago, the sober-minded art world cast out such nefarious concepts as “spirit” or “presence”. Things change, though, and – as is the art-world way – tend to flip to their opposites. So spookiness is now on the agenda, and Lauren Gault and Allison Gibbs here pick up on the extrasensory tremors. Their semi-collaborative exhibition of film installations and sculptural assemblages is titled Fugue States, after the traumatic condition in which individuals can suddenly lose all sense of previous identity. Gault and Gibbs attempt to rebuild some kind of personal aura out of shadows, silhouettes and imprints.  CCA, to Sunday 6 September  If only all art with an educational mission promised as much fun as Alien Sex Club, tackling HIV and its place in popular culture with fortune tellers, zany cartoons, psychedelic wallpaper and suggestive vegetables in hats. Walter’s sculptures, paintings, videos and performances, born from research with UCL’s HIV specialist Dr Alison Rodger, are housed in a “cruise maze”, a setting for sexual discovery in gay clubs and saunas. Throughout, Walter’s treatment of the issues is determinedly playful and current. His tarot pack, for instance, includes figures such as Breaking Bad’s Walter White, a reference to “chemsex”, one of the recent big risks for transmission among gay men.  Ambika P3, NW1, to Friday 14 August  In the night-school art class, they’d call this cheating. Tony Swain is good at colouring in. His trademark technique consists of ripping up choice images from yesterday’s papers, collaging them together to form fragmented compositions, and painting into them. It sounds elementary, yet Swain conjures landscapes, cityscapes, seascapes and near abstractions of rare atmosphere and mood. The absorbency of the newsprint leaches the colour out of the paint to leave a melancholy resonance reminiscent of old-time, hand-painted photographs. The cut and torn edges punctuate the space with compositional slippages and multiple perspectives. Swain is at his most evocative when he almost obscures the original imagery in semi-abstract fields of super delicate pastel tones. He transforms yesterday’s news into tonight’s dreams.  The Modern Institute, to Saturday 22 August  Emerging out of the neo-expressionist craze of the 1980s, which saw painters throughout the western world piling on angst and impasto, Jeffrey Dennis has continued to plow his maverick trajectory, albeit against a more upbeat psychedelic backdrop. His imagery may range from the flashy glamour of Bengali film posters through to the self-conscious profundities of Jean-Luc Godard, but everything tends to be entangled in clouds of amazement. His surfaces are reminiscent of the crumbling and graffiti-ridden mosaics of Mediterranean backstreets. A central piece, titled The Artist Successfully Levitating In The Studio, is intended as a reversal of the ironic defeatism of performance artist Bruce Nauman’s Failing To Levitate In My Studio. Dennis’s work may aspire towards the uplifting, but it’s still distinctly woozy in its spaced-out precariousness.  Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, Saturday 25 July to Saturday 17 October  Richard Long, AKA “the walking artist”, is renowned for works that, much of the time, no one ever sees in the flesh. His roadside interventions made from whatever is at hand – sticks, stones, a line drawn in the earth – are impermanent, crafted as he navigates landscapes that have, in his five-decade career, veered from rural Britain to Mongolia. What he brings back to show in galleries are photos, as well as texts and sculptures made from the natural materials peculiar to the places he visits. This major show in his home city of Bristol includes new works made from Cornish slate and mud from the river Avon, as well as a recreation of very early work from his 20s. He has also been commissioned to make a new piece of landscape art for the Bristol Downs: his Boyhood Line, revisits routes familiar to him since childhood in white limestone.  Arnolfini, Friday 31 October to Sunday 15 November  Eastern Approaches prize winner Arabel Rosillo de Blas is part of a long line of feminist artists upending women’s traditional roles. Tracey Emin’s embroidery, Laurie Simmons’s doll photos and Mona Hatoum’s torture chairs stand firmly behind her sculptures of doll’s house furniture, piled up and paint-smeared or covered with inhospitable barbs. Her post-award show filters feminist questions through a very English topic: the housing market. St Albans is one of middle England’s poshest property hotspots and the artist has focused on the town’s postwar developments, built on dreams of home ownership, to create works that include a doll’s house version of the property ladder, a wall built from green soap bricks, and tiles in soap.  Museum Of St Albans, to Thursday 6 August
Charles Avery | Lauren Gault & Allison Gibbs | John Walter| Tony Swain | Jeffrey Dennis | Richard Long| Arabel Rosillo De Blas