Thomas Demand, DCA, until 10 August

Jessica Voorsanger: I think I love you, Collective Gallery until 20 July

It all begins with a little white lie in German artist Thomas Demand’s first major UK solo show, at DCA. Flare is a series of 29 lyrical photographs of leaves at different times of the day, in different conditions – but then again it is not. Demand constructs life-size sculptures of everyday places entirely out of paper, lights them with care, and photographs them.

After twigging (no pun intended) that all is not as it seems, the visitor is treated to a recent departure in Demand’s art: 35mm film. This 90 second loop, Yard, uses the same leaves along with indistinct walls and a simulated wire fence to create an ambiguous night-time scene, illuminated by frequent camera flashes and given the flavour of an event by the crowd-filled soundtrack. The camera is seeking something – or someone – which never appears. This highly charged film creates a film-noir fiction – and a sense of reality – out of paper, and prepares the viewer for the large-scale photographs which form the main body of the show.

Demand’s subjects are the images universally available through newspaper, TV, and the internet – he chooses banal pictures of unoccupied spaces and places we may never have visited, but that will instantly evoke shared memories of people and events: the tantalising gangway of the Pope’s personal aeroplane, the paper-covered desks of George W Bush’s high-stress Florida recount. Every detail is meticulously reconstructed, from the abandoned telephones to the unexplained torches, and on close examination they are clearly not real. We are implicated in the lie, as we can’t help but respond emotionally to the evocative, paper-thin scenes.

Demand pushes his medium to micro and macro proportions, recreating a cracked pane of glass with remarkable skill (representing gaps by adding, not taking away), making Lawn with 72,000 individual blades of grass, and recreating an accurate constellation with pin-pricked paper and lights.

The little white lie becomes a whopper in the artist’s pièce de resistance – the film loop Recorder, where an all-paper reel-to-reel is animated so that it appears to be playing fragments of the Beach Boys’ never released album, Smile. The animation is deliberately jumpy, and the fragmented sound adds to the sense that things are not quite right – the lie is finally impossible to ignore, and we are forced to admit that, after all, nothing is real.

Dealing in a very different way with the mass-media experience is London-based artist Jessica Voorsanger. Her new show at the Collective, I think I love you, offers a fan’s-eye view of stars such as David Cassidy, Elvis and The Ramones. Voorsanger has been a loyal Cassidy fan all her life, and the most successful piece in this rather disparate show is Lunch with David, in which her taped interview with the singer (though she did most of the talking) is accompanied by the paraphernalia of her outing, most importantly Cassidy’s unwashed plate of left over crisps, cocktail sticks and satay sauce.

Other exhibits include the results of two competitions run by the artist in Liverpool, whose winners got to meet Liverpool FC players; a drawing of Prince Hamed Nazeem by his fan, Michael Barrymore (something of a coup for Voorsanger); and a series of mini-portraits made from tiny beads and housed in preposterously overblown frames, neatly representing the fan’s long distance view of the pop-star live in concert.

Although the theme is consistent, some of the artist’s works – particularly her community projects – feel shoe-horned into the exhibition. Also frustrating is Voorsanger’s reluctance to delve under the surface of today’s obsession with fame, instead of which she is content to play the starry-eyed disciple.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 06.07.03