A visit to the Changing Room always feels like a special treat.

This might be down its setting - the gallery is tucked away in a shopping arcade, rather than huddled together with other spaces in an artsy ghetto, or standing aloof on a grubby side-street awaiting impending gentrification - or the layout, which has visitors clamber up a dimly-lit stairwell before entering the bright, light-filled exhibition hall. More than these accidents of geography and design, though, it is the Changing Room’s consistent and unerring knack over the last decade for mounting thought-provoking group shows that prompts such a sense of anticipation.

And, with Tender Scene, they have done it again, presenting works by Fiona Jardine, Alex Pollard, Clare Stephenson and Gregor Wright that fizz with unexpected connections.

Pollard - who as well as exhibiting curated the show, billed as a ‘collaborative installation’ - dominates the proceedings. Building on Black Marks, his recent solo show at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice gallery, Pollard continues to mine a rich seam of thematic concerns, centring on the seedy glamour the New Romantic movement, with nods to the Pierrot clown of the Commedia dell’Arte, and to jesters, clowns and fools in general. While Black Marks was a rather overwhelming installation, with a batch of three foot wide bronze medallions and a huge wall drawing looming over the huge number of paintings on show, the trio of new works here have a quieter, more meditative air about them, as if, freed from the pressures of a major solo outing, Pollard has relaxed into this still-new strand of his practice.

These works, like all Pollard’s recent output, are monochrome, with a deliberately limited palette ranging from deep black to dark grey. Comet shows a tangle of snapped lipsticks, wonky eyebrow pencils and heavily distorted lines and numbers, only just recognisable as bar codes, with an overlapping set of forms that might be the trail of the titular heavenly body, or the hairspray-stiff fringe of a New Romantic. Jester is a faceless entertainer making himself up with the gooey contents of a make-up bag, while Grey Argot is Pollard in self-referential mode, presenting an amorphous blob of a cartoon speech balloon made of more sticky lippy that might almost serve as a painted manifesto for his current work.

Fiona Jardine’s contribution, They Became What They Beheld, runs alongside Pollard’s fascination with masks and make-up. A pair of photographs show a figure seated on a plinth, his two-piece suit protected by a paper boiler suit. In both images, the face is obscured by a bulbous spherical helmet, bearing a triangle in one photograph, a star in the other, a sinister update to the sock and buskin masks of classical theatre.

Clare Stephenson is concerned with theatre, artifice and disguise too. Miss Verily-Existant and Miss Quite-Transcendant are, a note informs us, a pair of ‘existential drag queens’. They star in two drawings, both clad in ruched metallic robes based on repeated forms borrowed from medieval church sculptures, both with sinister porcelain doll faces and awkwardly animated limbs, both performing beside mysterious wooden structures of unguessable purpose.

And then there’s Gregor Wright, who knocks the whole show off-balance, like a past-tipsy gatecrasher stumbling uninvited into a private party. An untitled work shows what appears to be a thermos flask rendered in disconcertingly fleshy pink. Every Extend Extra sees a set of cubic forms piled up like refugees from a game of Tetris gone rotten, while Caffeine is a cartoon portrait of a grinning little chap, steam billowing from his head. In the centre of the room sits Metamorph, an awkward, lumpy construction jury-rigged together from off-cuts of Styrofoam and wood panels, a low-rent Transformer robot caught in the act of shifting from man to machine.

Wright is a peculiar proposition at the best of times. His unfinished aesthetic and deliberately slapdash methods are hugely attractive, not to mention good fun, and the studied incompleteness of his work offers a winking challenge to the viewer, who is invited to finish off what Wright has started. Here, surrounded as he is by a trio of artists who are, if not party members, then at least fellow travellers, bound together further by subtle alterations to the gallery space - the floor is striped like an Everton mint, and patches of wall are covered in dazzle ship-like camoflague patterns - he sticks out like a sore thumb.

And yet these blowsy works fit with the quieter, more considered pieces around them, acting as grist to the mill, or sand in the Vaseline. Without Wright, Tender Scene might have been a rather ordinary group outing, a decent-but-uninspiring look at a group of artistic allies. With him, the lines connecting Jardine, Pollard and Stephenson are drawn all the more clearly.

This review was first published in The Herald in July, 2007.