The mode of hyperrealist​ sculpture favoured by the likes of Patricia Piccinini​, Ron Mueck​ and Sam Jinks can feel like a dead-end street. While realism's great device is its conjuring of empathy, kinship and pathos, hyperrealism​ can often fall victim to a kind of empty virtuosity. We tend to get caught up in likeness and effect and, in the process, fail to delve anywhere deeper into allegory or meaning. Love them or hate them, Piccinini​'s mutant, fleshy, hair-strewn sculptures have always offered something slightly different, in that her beasties are hyperreal​ only in part: the folds of skin, the sway of hair and the sparkle of the eye. Their forms, however, are fictions. While one such sculpture holds court in her new show, And Colour is Their Flesh, a volley of graphite, ink and gouache drawings populate the majority  of this new body of work. While her fastidiously rendered graphite works – which depict the female body in various states of hair-tangled contortion – are a little wooden in their gestures and rendering, her ink and gouache works prove something of a joy. A suite of works lining the gallery's right wall pictures meticulous forms that hint at both the figurative and the botanical, atop blooms of flat, bright colour. They loosen Piccinini​'s whim for detail with an unlikely playfulness and flair.

Until May 9; Tolarno​ Galleries, level 4, 104 Exhibition Street, city, 9654 6000, tolarnogalleries.com

EARTH MATTERS: CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHERS IN THE LANDSCAPE

It's often the quieter, less presumptuous works that resonate  most strongly in Earth Matters: Contemporary Photographers in the Landscape. The want for the spectacular and decisive image can be a curse, and such a sensibility tends to railroad the work of five-man collective Ninety Degrees Five, whose sweeping vistas, richly colourful aerial landscapes, didactic texts and immensely scaled filmic work dominate more than half the space dedicated to this otherwise poetic show. The quintet's technical mastery and cinematic style  are clear for all to see, but their work's aesthetic and gaze hold us at arm's length; wow-factor doesn't necessarily translate to evocation or empathy. In the adjoining space, works by Christian Thompson, Silvi Glattauer​, Rosemary Laing and others show alongside the exhibition's strongest photographs: a diptych by Anne Ferran​ and a large-scale lightbox​ by Siri​ Hayes. Ferran's pair of elegant monochromatic images on aluminium reveal the subtle undulations of an empty paddock – once home to a female convict prison – outside the Tasmanian town of Ross. Picturing little, they speak of the inquisitiveness and fallibility of photography as historical record. Hayes' work shows a female photographer in the Latrobe Valley landscape, her camera turned askew from the distant, billowing smokestacks of the Yallourn Power Station. It is playful and powerful – a gesture of either wilful ignorance or defiance.

Until May 3; Monash Gallery of Art, 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill, 8544 0500, mga.org.au

MICHELLE HAMER: THIS IS WHAT IT ISN'T MEANT TO BE

That Michelle Hamer frames her work as "hand-stitched pixilation" is appropriate. Photographing then stitching vernacular city phraseology – in the form of road signs, graffiti, advertising and activist slogans – her mixed-yarn-on-perforated-plastic works read almost like digital renderings, despite their fastidiously handmade qualities. A series of drawings made using the same plastic grids dominates this new exhibition. They too are painstaking in their detail and rigour, with Hamer achieving great variation, depth, light and shade with subtle, finicky flits of the hand.  Where This is What it isn't Meant to Be begins to fall down is in its presentation, which feels a tad half-baked. These works are interesting enough for their truisms and detail, but their nondescript unframed presentation does them few favours as objects.

Last day today; Fehily Contemporary, 3a Glasshouse Road, Collingwood, 9017 0860, fehilycontemporary.com.au