Juergen Teller is a slippery customer. In the early 1990s, his work for the style magazines turned fashion pho­to­graphy on its head. Re­flect­ing the haute couture set's adoption of grunge by focussing not on clothes, but on the model, snapping away with a point-and-shoot camera, Teller exchanged the artifice of the high gloss pose for a no less ar­ti­fi­ci­al aesthetic of studied non­chal­ance. Then, ef­fort­lessly, the com­mer­ci­al pho­to­graph­er­ became a fine artist, changing the context in which his work is shown, and his subjects, but not, im­port­antly, his methods.

The result, spread over four rooms of In­ver­leith House, is no less slippery. Awailable is a survey of sorts, six year's worth of work selected by Teller, it seems, to show the breadth of his practice, which takes in portraits of artists, models, designers and actresses, shots of his children and family, and, in the Nürnberg series, a pseudo-doc­u­ment­ary look at the environs of his family home in Bavaria.

Vivienne Westwood appears twice, both images playfully sub­ver­t­ing her public image. In Vivienne At Home, the designer appears as the wild-eyed bag lady of tabloid op­pro­bri­um, in Boadicea Vivienne, she is the done up as a punk warrior. Similarly, Gisele Bündchen is shown in two lights, first writhing in faux-ecstasy at a fashion shoot, then, in Gisele In My Bath, she un­der­mines any sense of vul­n­er­ab­il­ity with a steely gaze. Along with the wit, there's a good dollop of sen­ti­ment­al­ity, but again, one suspects Teller is winking as he opens the shutter. Cherub sees Teller's son Ed striking an angelic attitude, Tante Elfriede shows his aunt and her poodle at home, in a style that seems to wilfully mis­un­der­stand the legacy of Martin Parr.

There's no question about the status of this work as art (it's in a gallery after all), nor does the pho­to­graph­er­'s com­mer­ci­al past taint it in any way. Instead, it seems that Teller is self-con­s­ciously ad­dress­ing these un­cer­tain­ties. His fashion work is like informal por­trait­ure, and his informal portraits seem to be schilling a product, from happy family life to ef­fort­less glamour to snowfall in the coun­tryside. Thanks to Westwood's presence, it is hard not to remember Johnny Rotten's ambiguous question at the fag end of the Sex Pistols' career: 'Did you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?'. Just as Rotten was asking himself the same question as his audience, so Teller's work is about his own role, as fashion world rebel or art scene in­ter­lop­er­. That awkward status is not as trouble­some as Teller might hope, but it is what makes his work if not powerful, then at least in­triguing.

It's tempting to attempt a neat segue from Teller's exhibit to the work of Andrew Miller, which fills the lower floors of In­ver­leith House - they both delight in sub­ver­t­ing modes of re­p­res­ent­a­tion, engage in re­con­fig­ur­ing reality, and force awkward questions on their audience - but, really, they have little in common.

Sixes And Sevens is a set of new works, all completed in the last year. The first, Mirrored Pavilion is a me­t­ic­u­lous re­cre­a­tion of a shack Miller spotted while working in Trinidad. It is a mys­ter­i­ous structure - it could be a small dwelling, a store house, even a signal box for some long-abandoned railway - and years of decay have further obscured its purpose. Miller has recreated it twice over, too. First, in Room 1, then again, as a perfect mirror image, in Room 3, an act that, in creating an imagined twin, sim­ul­tan­eously completes the building and raises further questions about its nature, heightened by the addition of mirrors to its frame.

Between these two halves sits another structure, titled Station, again of unknown purpose. Built from the memory of a fleeting encounter, this time in the lane behind Miller's studio, the object might be a desk, or a fixture from a hairdress­er­'s salon, or something that could be put to more sinister ends. Miller also reminds us that he is a sculptor - the Station bears more mirrors, is lacquered in deep black, unlike the original object, and is awkwardly propped up on concrete block.

Outside the gallery, in a Secret Garden boxed in with high hedges, sits another re­con­struc­tion, Frame. It is the skeleton of a municipal play­ground swing, carefully aged with painted streaks of rust.

This last piece is, perhaps, the key to un­der­stand­ing Miller's work. It is im­me­di­ately evocative, a musing on time and place, but also un­den­i­ably sculp­tur­al, a formal piece with nods to Modernism.

Miller is not turning the real into art, or revealing the beauty in over­looked objects, he is ques­tion­ing the nature of reality and of art, dis­solv­ing the dis­t­inc­tion between the two and, with his careful al­ter­a­tions - the mirrors on Mirrored Pavilion, the lacquer on Station - turning acts of re­mem­ber­ing, his and ours, into a series of aesthetic choices.

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