On a blustery, grey day on the banks of the River Tay, it’s tempting to see the work of Spencer Finch as akin to those therapy lamps that simulate the sunrise, resetting the body clock, and allowing those of us depressed by the late dawn to leap out of bed, full of the joys of summer.

I don’t mean to compare Finch’s large-scale sculptural installations, delicate paintings and subtle interventions to a fancy alarm clock, but the work on show at Dundee Contemporary Arts does provide a sensory kick up the backside and, often using the simplest of means, transports the viewer to different times, places and climes, from a cloudy summer afternoon in Massachusetts to the clear skies of a winter morning in New Zealand.

The Massachusetts afternoon comes first, in the form of a light, airy installation that labours under one of Finch’s trademark descriptive titles, Sunlight In An Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004).

Finch spent this day in the late poet’s backyard logging the shade cast by the clouds overhead, later converting his readings into a huge cloud-shaped mess of blue, grey and purple colour filters of the sort used by photographers. These cellophane sheets are held in place with wooden clothes pegs, and suspended from the ceiling before a blindingly bright array of fluorescent striplights of varying colour temperatures, in an attempt to recreate the quality of the New England sun. As weather simulations go, Sunlight In An Empty Room isn’t much cop, a cobbled-together, jerry-built experiment that would raise eyebrows at a school science fair. But, as the plastic cloud shifts slightly in the breeze of the building’s air-conditioning, and the yellowish lights cast soft blue shadows on the walls, it’s clear that Finch is trying to capture the simple pleasure of observing a cloud making its way across the sky - and in this he succeeds.

Next door in the large gallery, Night Sky (Over the Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004) is a constellation of softly twinkling lights hung from the ceiling. At first, it looks like a crude attempt to plot the stars, but the regular, modular construction of the light fittings and precise arrangement of differently-sized incandescent bulbs suggest the coloured balls and black sticks of chemistry lab models, a clue to the artist’s method. Finch made his skyscape by combining paints to match the black of the night, then - using a process I won’t pretend to understand - established the molecular ratio of each pigment in his mixture, and modelled the molecular structure of each pigment, with each of the 401 bulbs in the final installation representing a single atom. The sculpture is beautiful as it is, but when Finch’s process is revealed, it becomes more so, a rigorously scientific act of poetic transubstantiation, an encoded study of a single colour.

A new work, Sky (Over Franz Josef Glacier, April 8, 2008, 10:40AM) works in a similar way, but it’s leavened with a healthy dose of humour. A perfectly square pool of water, dyed bright blue to match the sky Finch observed back in April, feeds into a huge ice-making machine, which sporadically drops a load of ice-cubes on to a slipway, where they slowly melt and drip into the water below, and the process begins again. On one level, this closed system is as full of science and poetry as Night Sky, a tiny simulation of cracking glaciers matched to a minimalist liquid painting, but it’s also wonderfully silly, a great juddering Heath- Robinson contraption that wheezes into life - making visitors lost in contemplation of the deep blue pool at its base jump out of their skin.

On the wall opposite, another new piece sees Finch inspired by his first major show in Scotland to tackle a long-standing fascination with the Scottish Enlightenment. The piece 8456 Shades of Blue (After Hume) converts a thought experiment in David Hume’s 1748 paper An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding into a rough, real world demonstration, in which Finch dripped 28 colours of blue paint on to paper, dipping his brush in water after each drop, making each mark a shade lighter than the one before.

The final installation housed in two small rooms at the far end of the main gallery is an even subtler investigation of perception. In one room, five fluorescent lamps are wrapped in blue filters, in the other, the walls are clad in white paint mixed with Prussian blue pigment and lit with unfiltered lamps. In both rooms, the blue is barely there, little more than a slight cooling of the light, but, no matter how hard you strain to see a difference, Finch’s two methods produce identical results.

While 8456 Shades of Blue might have been conceived to match it’s debut showing in Scotland, all the pieces here seem very much at home in the austere rooms of the DCA. Even the sheen of the highly-polished floors - a flaw in the gallery’s design that tends to distract from the works - serve Finch well, offering a diffused reflection of Night Sky that tempers its hard, scientific edges, and allowing the faintest tint of blue light to leak out of the blue rooms at the rear.

In Glasgow, The Common Guild have mounted a companion show in Douglas Gordon’s townhouse on the edge of Kelvingrove Park dedicated to works on paper by Finch, and the pieces gathered here also suit their surroundings to a T. Finch is still concerned with colour and light, but, instead of looking outward, seeking to make new sense of the world and the way in which we perceive it, he turns his attention to intimate interior spaces. A sequence of watercolours sees Finch document the colours of light that passed before his eyes during a day spent at his studio. Another set of studies, pastels this time, capture the colour of the ceiling in Sigmund Freud’s consulting room.

A set of inkblots that wend their way up the stairwell is known as 102 Colours From My Dreams. Each one was made by Finch at the moment of waking, and together they form a diary of colours he saw in his dreams. There’s no need to interpret these self-made Rorschach tests, though, as Finch helpfully provides titles that build up into an absurd, comic monologue, a jolly litany of disordered memories and strange fictions of the artist’s sleeping life, which match each colour.

These two shows demonstrate two sides of Finch, and the separation of his work does him a favour. Had Finch’s first major solo outing in the UK been a single-gallery affair, the large-scale pieces of the Dundee exhibition would likely have overwhelmed the more delicate material of the Glasgow display, and the more intimate works on paper might well have acted as distractions from the self-contained investigations of the grand installations.

By focusing on two distinct, if allied, strands of Finch’s practice, DCA and The Common Guild in total paint a better picture of the artist’s practice than they could have done alone.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 21st November, 2008.

This year, those of us who can’t remember anything about the 1960s because, not having been born, we weren’t really there, have had to put up with baby boomers reminiscing about 1968, painted as twelve months of sit-ins, student uprisings, civil rights triumphs and general grooviness.

The ideas that lie behind Altered States of Paint are drawn from the darker side of the counterculture, and the show is more ‘69 than ‘68, skipping free love and revolutionary politics in favour of Woodstock warnings against taking the brown acid, the occultist experimentation of Kenneth Anger and Bobby Beausoleil, Brian Jones floating dead in his swimming pool, and the violent full-stop to the decade provided by Charles Manson and the Hells Angels at Altamont. The show’s title is borrowed from Ken Russell’s 1980 film Altered States, in which hero Dr. Jessup loses mind and body both, on fly agaric in his isolation tank, and curator Graham Domke quotes Aldous Huxley in his introductory text: ‘The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out.’

Heavy stuff. And yet the show opens with Rabiya Choudry’s decidedly jolly wall painting. This huge slab of black, pink and glittering gold completely covers the entrance to the gallery, and is full of cartoon faces with bulging eyes, halfway between SpongeBob SquarePants and Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat, peeping out from behind bold graphic motifs. It’s an indication that, for all those intimations of psychedelic doom and gloom, Domke has conjured up a complex creature of an exhibition, happy to undermine his stated premise, to clash artists rather than match them, and, ultimately, to confuse his audience rather than guiding them.

Inside the gallery proper, the first room holds a sort of capsule show-within-a-show, with work by all but one of the exhibiting artists. Till Gerhard’s Healter might reference the Manson Family’s unfortunate obsession with the Beatles, but it’s a light, airy piece of work, with three women dancing around a fairground helter skelter, obscured by spray-painted blasts of colour. Andreas Dobler’s Up In Smoke has an impenetrable, alien air, with rail tracks burnt to ash and two concrete structures with smoking bowls set in a fiery void. Then comes a sudden shift. Angela de la Cruz alters the state of painting by turning her canvases into sculptural forms, breaking down the stretcher of Super Clutter XXL and bolting it back together, turning a cool, collected work in high-gloss pink and brown into a frozen act of violence. Neil Clements makes sculptural paintings too, the surface of Dee a restrained minimalist essay in grey and black, countered by a canvas that borrows its shape from the Gibson Flying V guitar. What is going on here? These are artists with very different aims, some internationally established, some, like Clements and Choudry, emerging onto the Scottish scene. Jutter Koether’s small painting, which layers liquid glass and pushed-in thumbtacks over a roughly-sketched “A”, provides an answer, or a clue - all the works in the room are, or contain, the triangular shape of that letter. It’s a neat trick - rather than forcing a connection between the artists he has brought together, Domke allows a simple, formal correspondence to hint that, for all their differences, these painters share something, even if, at this point, it is no more than a superficial similarity.

In the main gallery space, the connections implied by that A-shape become clearer: these painters are all explorers. Andreas Dobler explores worlds of his own devising. Turfstones offers a post-apocalyptic scene, with half-buried Brutalist relics fording a lava stream. Meditating the wreck sees a woman, cross-legged, contemplating a crashed space ship. Stretch it is full of a strange elastic mould, infecting an artist’s studio. Til Gerhard’s explorations drift through real time and interior space, borrowing cultural artefacts from the past - the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Hot Rocks LP, scenes from the The Wicker Man - and dips them in private hallucinatory visions.

Jutta Koether provides a companion piece to her work in the first gallery, this time a letter K, spelling out her debt to Kenneth Anger. A series of small works, again peppered with tacks, suggest the completion of arcane rituals, and the repeated use of reflective materials offers a distorted view of the viewer, and skewed glimpses of the exhibition itself. Her large scale work, Touch and Resist 5 is a huge, hastily-rendered monochrome, seven metres across, that borrows compositionally from Titian and Reubens, but, thanks to its clumsy, hurried brushtrokes, is firmly placed within the Koether canon.

Once more, Koether provides the glue that binds the show together. The explicit engagement with art history of Touch and Resist 5 points to Clements. ‘85, another canvas cut into the shape of a guitar, this time the sort favoured by heavy metal soloists, again operates at the junction between painting and sculpture with. Clements goes further with (Full Stop), a pair of paintings that merge two traditions. Both might be seen as close-up copies of Malevich’s Black Square, but after hanging his stark canvases, Clements holds a can of spraypaint up and empties it onto the centre of each work, following the instructions of arch-conceptualist Lawrence Weiner.

Like Clements, de la Cruz makes work that explores its own making, but hers is a still more self-contained, self-referential practice. Clutter VI (with white blanket) is deconstructs and reconstructs another painting, only to obscure it almost completely beneath another canvas. Ready To Wear is a small, square work, and this time the canvas is peeled back and ruched, revealing the frame and the wall behind. Best of all, the all-black canvas of Stuck has been unceremoniously jammed into an entranceway, firmly closing the doors of perception that this exhibit promised to open.

The inclusion of Clements and de la Cruz is intriguing. Their work is the best here, but, for all that they fit in with a loose theme of painterly exploration, neither are easy bedfellows for the more explicit mining of the dark side of the 1960s dream found in the work of their peers here. They do, though, complete the exhibition. Without their cool, collected essays on the possibilities of painting, Altered States of paint might well have been too overbearing, too trippy, and, like the those rose-tinted memories of ‘68, too simple a show.

This review was first published in The Herald on Friday 5th September , 2008.

A funny thing happens at the degree shows: there is so much art, stuffed into every studio, corridor, nook and cranny of the art schools that a viewer’s brain can’t quite cope, and attempts to pick out themes, group artists together and spot trends in a bid to impose order on the chaos. Artists whose work, if seen in different galleries weeks apart, might seem to have little in common become kissing cousins, and the artists whose work stands out set the tone for their peers.

At Duncan of Jordanstone College, the first theme to hove into view is the animal. There are beasts everywhere, real or imagined, and it seems as if half of the studio spaces contain fur, feathers, hides and horns.

Ashley Nieuwenhuizen’s work is perhaps the most powerful examination of the relationship between human and animal. She has performed a series of arcane rituals, strapping dead birds to her body with twine, slowly, deliberately ingesting horse hair, which are matched to hybrid drawings and a furry knapsack studded with teats which emits contented purrs. Disturbing stuff, sure, but Nieuwenhuizen is serious, not out to shock. Ai Kato’s sculptures are decidedly discomforting too. She has crafted a new mythology inhabited by a figure adorned with duck bills and mollusc shells who surfs a wave of ghosts, and a winged and bearded baby nestled in a chamber made of animal hides. Iain Sommerville’s work is a sort of update to the Punch and Judy show, with angry cartoons reminiscent of Ralph Steadman overlooking a pair of literally pig-headed thugs. Laurie Gault’s striking sculptures are another direct look at human-animal relations, this time expressed with great restraint.

Gault’s work - antlers on poles cast in a matte plasticky yellow substance, an outsize crocodile clip with a peacock feather for a tail, stumpy thumb-like forms - flags up another trend. The best of the graduates making sculpture show a great affinity for their materials. Scott Shepherd breathes life into grubby rubber castings of two-pin plugs, showing an inflatable udder-like structure and a poisonous jellyfish submerged in brackish water. Alistair Jelks’ figurative sculpture, like a profoundly depressed modern take on Rodin’s The Thinker, stands out thanks to his assured use of cast iron with its patina of rust. Sharon McNiven engages with the history of her chosen media, exploring the possibilities of traditional woodworking techniques to make precise abstract forms. Lauren Curran disrupts the pristine sheen of her small sculptures with imprints of mushrooms, and what look like tiny pursed lips. These sculptors know their stuff, in both senses of the term.

When it comes to painting and drawing, the trend, if you can call it that, is skill. Ghe Zhang’s hyper-real canvases work with multiple traditions in Chinese art, and are executed with a quiet panache. Joanna Fraser is like a latter-day Joan Eardley, painting girls at rest and at play in a fluid style, allowing surroundings to drift away to keep the focus firmly on her young subjects. Camilla Symons is a superb draughtswoman, with some fine work in pencil on show, but it is her silverpoint renderings of rabbits and birds that really take the breath away. Two painters with a shared liking for urban spaces also stand out. David Anderson almost seems in awe of the underpasses, car parks and unassuming stairwells he paints, while Ross Brown prefers derelict vistas, undermining his deft renderings with hastily-made charcoal marks. Then there’s Nicole Porter and Fraser Gray, two very different painters who match technical facility with a concern for the process of making work. Porter’s realist canvases include self-portraits of the artist in her studio, charming small-scale paintings of pages in her sketchbook and a painting of a painting of her fellow graduates in conversation. Gray, meanwhile, sits on the fence between street art and studio work, inserting a canvas into a wall-drawing and drilling viewing port into the wall overlooking one of his large-scale pieces.

This tendency explore the process of making art is to the fore in the work of artists of a more explicitly conceptual bent, too. Poppy Brewer presents the results of a performance, also documented in grainy black and white video, in which she crafted a sort of cloth shelter, cut precise strips from a sheet of paper and made gnomic notes about the idea of infinity on blackboards. Breeshey Gray performs too, turning her allotted space into a domestic salon, chatting about art with her friends, and drinking tea. This everyday ritual is explored again via a collection of carefully catalogued tea bags, a quirky monument to a year’s worth of cuppas. Another art-making ritual, this one rather more riotous, can be found in Nadia Rossi’s madcap lab. Rossi has filled a room with bits and bobs, and cut holes in the walls so that, with the help of visitors, she can poke her arms into the space and chuck paint about, combine objects and otherwise overcome her self-imposed restrictions. Fraser MacDonald’s rough-hewn hoops match one vicious game, croquet, with another, the art world, while his gilded training shoe and pastorally painted Tetrapak carton are, thanks to their museum-like presentation, works of art about curation. This is underlined by another of the artist’s projects, a tiny gallery housed in a locker, which over the last year has shown pieces by real live artists, David Shrigley among them, and what look like figments of MacDonald’s imagination.

There are, of course, plenty of artists who buck the trends, carving out a niche all their own. Kirsten Wilson has made two matching monolithic structures into which she blasts high volume noise. The interior of the first is bare - step inside and be deafened - the second is lined with sound-proofing material, together they expose the relationship between sound and space. Graeme Plunkett works with sound too. He has housed a domestic canary in a cage rigged up with sensors and tiny loudspeakers which play recordings of birdsong triggered by the bird’s motion. Ethically suspect? Perhaps, but an intriguing look at the audible environment nonetheless. Outside the building, Euan James Taylor’s work a highlight of the show. Taylor, who collaborated with Macdonald on the locker gallery, has rigged up gloriously pointless structures out of pallets - a stile over a wall is placed right next to an entranceway, for example - and, in a little caravan, documents the activities of his invented organisation, Inefficient Solutions, “purveyors of superficial commodities” devoted to “creating and solving problems”.

Of course, not all the work on show matches the standard set by the artists listed above, but this is without doubt a strong year group. There is nothing here to make you cringe, no embarrassingly derivative works, and very few outright failures. It’s a fine start to the degree show season.

All too often, the curators of group shows are guilty of shoehorning artists together, beginning with a premise, then finding work that proves it. Here, curator Lynne Cook of the Dia Centre for the Arts in New York has done the opposite, corralling three artists - Chantal Akerman, Lili Dujourie and Francesca Woodman - whose work practically begs to be shown together.

All three use the camera, whether to make photographs, film or video; all three train their lenses on themselves in their immediate environs. And in so doing, all three raise questions about gender and the female body in art, make inquiries into issues of identity, and use their chosen media to slip the usual moorings of time. Seeing them together, there are so many shared concerns, so many echoes, such a sense of dialogue between their respective practices that it is hard to believe that Akerman, Dujourie and Woodman were operating in isolation, largely unaware of each other's work.

Ellipsis opens with Woodman, who died young and relatively obscure, aged 22, a suicide. It seems fair to say that her posthumous reputation - at least among the young artists on whom she continues to exert an influence - is in part thanks to the poisonous Romantic notion that a great talent lost is all the greater, but in the room at the DCA devoted to her small black-and-white prints the weight of that reputation is lifted from the shoulders of her work. We see her in her studio, or in the grubby rooms of abandoned houses, relentlessly investigating the possibilities of self-portraiture. Mirrors and glass are everywhere. Woodman hides herself, uselessly, behind clear panes, huddles behind mirrors or crouches like a museum exhibit inside a vitrine. This tendency to reflect, deflect and direct the viewer's gaze is at its most powerful in a work where, unusually, Woodman appears only by proxy: three women, naked, stare into the lens, their faces obscured by a print of Woodman's own face.

Elsewhere, the focus is on the female body in its surroundings, with Woodman deliberately making herself invisible, concealed behind drapes of peeling wallpaper. There is a lot of blurring, too, not just to produce artefacts of long exposure, but to introduce the passage of time into the still photographs.

Time and movement are central to the work of Lili Dujourie. Fourteen of her video works, made between 1972 and 1981 - coincidentally or not, the same span as Woodman's working life - are ranged across a bank of monitors on the gallery floor. The first five of these, all bearing the title Homage à (one of many ellipses in this show) leave the viewer to fill in the possible subject of Dujourie's tributes. That subject is any artist - male, it is safe to assume - who has ever painted a nude: Dujourie films herself on a bed, or on the floor beside it, shifting from familiar reclining poses to awkward arrangements of limbs, a device that highlights the artificial positions in representations of women's bodies. Perhaps thanks to the sometimes violent movements or obvious discomfort of some poses, these pieces call to mind more unsavoury examples of such representation - Walter Sickert's Camden Town nudes, say, or John Deakin's exploitative photographic studies of Henrietta Moraes for Francis Bacon. In other videos, Dujourie again adopts cliched poses, here a sultry vamp, there a listless housewife. While time is inevitably present in the moving image, Dujourie, in a way that recalls the motion blur in Woodman's work, injects a sense of progression into her works, only to subvert it. Oostende, a series of images shot from the artist's studio, are shown as slides, each one with a projector of its own. The mode of display will have viewers waiting with baited breath for the usually imminent shift on to the next image, but it never comes - an ellipsis with no resolution.

More ellipses follow in the films of Chantal Akerman. Je tu il elle, an installation reworking of a feature-length film, offers a deconstructed narrative on three screens. The first shows the heroine played, inevitably, by Akerman engaged in odd rituals, eating sugar from a bag, restlessly rearranging sheets of paper on the floor and, in an echo of Dujourie, shifting between poses on a mattress. The second sees a woman who may or may not be the same character chatting in a bar with a man, waiting with him in an idling truck, and watching him shave. The third is an extended, if not explicit, sex scene in which Akerman's character, or someone who looks the same, fumbles with a girlfriend. It's an exercise in mystery, obfuscation and omission, with Akerman setting up possible interpretations and leaving them hanging: are we being shown a split narrative, the imaginings of the first woman, or something else entirely? Akerman's new edit of the 1971 film Mirror provides, finally, some resolution, reflecting and combining devices just seen in Woodman's photographs and Dujourie's Homage series: a young woman stands before a looking glass and dispassionately appraises her own body, feature by feature.

This is a powerful show that explores - if you'll excuse the term - the first flowering of feminist video art. It is worth noting that these women share more than a common set of concerns in that, while they provided primary texts for feminist critical theory, and their work can only be seen today through the lens of that discourse, none of them made their work explicitly within that context. While the body, questions of identity and the mediated gaze of the camera are to the fore, Ellipsis is also a show about time. This is not the sort of exhibition you can flit through, pausing for a little while before works that catch your eye. Instead, the shifting of time in the works on show - Dujourie's frozen slides, the long static shots in Akerman's films, Woodman's stilled movements - imposes a sort of active torpor on the viewer, slowing time to the pace of a too-hot afternoon. This effect is, at least in part, down to sensitive curation by Cook, who has done much more than simply bring Akerman, Dujourie and Woodman together, and has, moreover, arranged their work in such a way as to expose new, unexpected connections between the three artists.

Ellipsis is at DCA, Dundee until June 22nd, 2008.

This review was first published in The Herald on May 9th, 2008.

For her first solo show in Scotland, the Norwegian, Glasgow-educated sculptor Camilla Low has brought together existing works with a series of new pieces to craft a distinctly calm and collected display, one that matches a studied examination of formal possibilities with a strong sense of place.

The new works are fashioned from concrete cubes, crafted on site from local materials, and a match for the industrial architecture of the Dundee Contemporary Arts’ exhibition spaces. These cubes are piled and stacked, with the occasional surface painted smooth, in hues chosen from a limited palette of mostly primary colours. Resting on the arrangements of blocks are similarly precise rectilinear wooden forms: squares and oblongs defined in space and, again, treated with a high-gloss, brightly-coloured coating that denies their rough, organic origins.

Low is working in a tradition here - the modular minimalism of Sol LeWitt springs to mind, and there are echoes of Malevich’s pared-down suprematism - but she is no copyist, conveying, instead, a deep understanding of the potential of simple forms to interact with each other and the space around them. In a rather neat curatorial trick, Low’s new works stand free on the gallery floor, while earlier works, many of which lean on walls for support or are suspended from the ceiling, gather around, as if looking fondly on their progeny. And those earlier pieces are less polished, less repetitive. Diva is a collection of unpainted wooden blocks, pulled up off the floor by a cord, which Sister sees a busy cluster of orange Perspex triangles pierced by a metal rod. Best of them all is White Steel, a bent and bashed sheet of metal that has been treated to a glamorous sheen.

If the retrospective element of the show provides variety, it is the formal exploration through repetition and rearrangement of the new elements that gives the show its strength. At first sight, so many similar works might appear dull, but walk among them and the restraint that characterises Low’s recent practice offers an almost meditative experience, a set of forms pushed to their limits.

Back in Glasgow, Craig Mulholland is showing no signs of restraint, but proving once again that he is the most prolific polymath working in the city today. His new show is spread across two venues - the Glasgow School of Art and Sorcha Dallas - filling both to the gunnels, and is further fleshed out with a short digital film. Mulholland’s concerns are similarly broad, resting on the idea information in its many forms, from data storage to surveillance, encryption to virtual realities and the social and political impact of information technologies.

The Art School’s Mackintosh Gallery has been infested with an army of decidedly sinister tripods. Some bear the weight of rough-hewn pewter globes, others carry gobbets of dense, rubbery material, their rounded surfaces bearing traces of tightly-wound string, others still serve as easels, displaying framed works, “paintings” made of etched metal and polycarbonate.

More of these metal paintings - nigh on 20 of them - adorn the walls, ranging from finicky, precise geometrics, to wild splatters. There is something in the arrangement of the tripods that suggests a transmission and reception of data, as if, when unobserved, they might twitch into life, their loads to be collected, examined and interpreted, like physical manifestations of the coded robots that crawl the web, reporting their findings back to search engines.

On the other side of the room, the silver and black of the tripods and etched works give way to white, with a group of 16 framed works made of pegboard. Arranged in a towering pyramid foundation, the first of them is dense, with layers of board piled up and torn away, and the last is barely there, with traces of board at its edges, and holes drilled directly into the gallery wall. If the grouping of the tripods and metal works hints at data in transit, the pegboard pieces suggest data loss, forming a eulogy to a failing hard drive, its stored information edging away bit by bit, byte by byte.

Across town at Sorcha Dallas, there are more metal works, this time edging away from the mathematical abstractions of their peers at the School of Art to hint at the representation of library shelves or half-broken satellites in orbit. In the centre of the first exhibition space, a found metal globe has been etched with lines of latitude and longitude, and an impossible geography of intersecting curves. Next door, there is an immersive five-screen video installation, Rising Resistance, in which images from the two exhibitions flow around the room.

In the past, when Mulholland has mounted sprawling shows like this - most notable Plastic Casino in 2004 - there was a sense that he was an artist in need of an editor: someone who would lock the doors of his studio and say, “Enough!” This time, though, the bewildering array of objects offered up for examination, and the almost impenetrable layering of imagery are lent coherence by, of all things, a 12-minute digitally animated rock opera, Peer To Peer. It is a stunning, albeit brief, piece of cinema.

Mulholland and his colibrettist, Laurence Figgis, tell the story of a Camera and its Operator, both exhausted by the weight of the information they must amass, sort and route around a system - what this information is, why it is being gathered and for whom is never made clear - expressed in language that hovers beautifully between code and poetry. On screen, a hard-disk platter is suspended in space, its surface attacked by a whirling galaxy of digital detritus, tripods scuttle about, up to God knows what, and the Camera, a floating metal globe with a blinking aperture, moves to and fro through a Borgesian library of data.

There is a distinct air of hysteria about all this, and the film oozes a sort of totalitarian camp: in lesser hands, the piece might err on the sillier side of sci-fi, but Mulholland who, for all the high seriousness of his projects, is not afraid to introduce a note of winking humour - makes it work. With his twin exhibitions and superb film work, Mulholland has, then fashioned a fully-formed world, an encoded vision that reformats a real world in which the gathering and retention of information is spiralling out of control, where the prospect of biometric identity cards and DNA databases looms, our every move is followed by surveillance cameras and undesirables are moved on by speakers emitting a high-pitched digital wine.

You will not find a better evocation of the dystopian present than this.

This review was first published in The Herald on 29th February, 2008.

It is hard to visit a gallery nowadays without being told that an artist is dealing in memory, history and place. They’re handy buzzwords - what, after all, isn’t to do with memory, history and place? - to prop up work that, lacking the supporting struts of a curator’s note, might well fall flat. One of the great pleasures of Matthew Buckingham’s first solo outing in Scotland, then, is that he is the real deal, mining the past to illuminate the present, making work backed by deep academic research, but that stands alone, dense with ideas, and doing what art does best, burrowing into the minds of its audience, sparking off new ideas and turning old ones on their heads.

The show opens with an installed video, The Spirit and the Letter. On the wall-sized screen, a woman enters a Georgian room in period dress, and speaks, her words drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft’s essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, fleshed out with quotations from other texts by the early feminist. This ghost of Wollstonecraft paces as she talks, but not across the floor, instead walking on the ceiling.

It’s a simple enough metaphor - the campaigning author wished to turn the world in which she found herself upside down (or, better, to turn it the right way up). But Buckingham doubles it with a simple gesture, installing a chandelier on the gallery floor, which forces us into sharing Wollstonecraft’s upended position, first physically, then, as the extracts from A Vindication of the Rights of Women are read, we find ourselves sharing her thoughts, which, anachronisms of language aside, are depressingly prescient, a still-current commentary on gender politics. And Buckingham has tinkered with the tenses in his source texts, too, siting Wollstonecraft firmly in her past, haunting our present, but also lending her words a fresh urgency. The spoken passages are also deftly chosen. Wollstonecraft mention of the ‘silence of spacious apartments’ and her footfalls in them, ties the quotations to their new context, and when she says, ‘Every object carries me back to past times, and impresses the manners of the age forcibly on my mind, for they may be considered as historical documents.’ it is hard not to take her words as a borrowed manifesto for Buckingham’s practice.

Next, Buckingham switches his focus to the history of his medium, in False Future. A narration in French, with English subtitles, tells the story of a lost figure in the history of the moving image, Louis Le Prince, a pioneer of cinema who succeeded in capturing motion five years before the Lumiere brothers found fame in 1895. Had Le Prince not worked in secret, his efforts known only to his family, and had he not disappeared without trace in 1890 after boarding a train - the very subject of the Lumiere’s first film - the history of cinema might have stretched back further to include, Buckingham suggests, the Elephant Man’s funeral, or the massacre of the Lakota at Wounded Knee. And Le Prince’s fate prefigures cinematic tropes, too - the tale of a madcap scientist working secretly on a world-changing invention, only to vanish in a puff of smoke is the stuff of B feature plots. On screen, meanwhile, Buckingham recreates one of Le Prince’s few surviving films, a static shot of a bridge in Leeds, fusing past with present.

Best of all the works here, though, is Everything I Need. On one screen, the interior of a 1970s aeroplane is examined, almost lovingly, in a series of slow takes, most as still as photographs. On the second, a text unfolds, the words of another figure in the history of feminism, Charlotte Wolff. We learn of her first love, her life as a doctor in Weimer-era Berlin in the company of Walter Benjamin, her exile in Paris with the Surrealists, and then in Britain, all memories shot through with a quiet polemic on the status of women, and lesbian women in particular. Each reminiscence is linked to a place, whether it’s the bars of Berlin or the bus stop where Wolff realised that she must flee Nazi Germany, and so the ‘plane interior becomes a sort of non-place, or place-between-places, an intellectual interzone in which memories can unfold, free from the immediate emotional impact of familiar surroundings.

Like The Spirit and the Letter and False Future, Everything I Need is a concise portrait of an historical figure, one that informs and illustrates, but one that raises more questions than it answers. What are we to think of a male artist exploring the history of feminism, or a film-maker turning his lens on film? Is Buckingham, with his precise installations, a sculptor as much as he is a film-maker, or a new kind of portraitist, his subject place and time as much as people? There are no easy answers to be found in Play the Story, and that’s what makes it such a fine show, the kind that takes up residence in every visitors memory.

This review was first published in The Herald on November 23rd, 2007.