Collective effort, singular rewards

The floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the Collective Gallery lend a certain lightness to the New Work Scotland Programme, and inform an indifferent public that through this place contemporary art can pass with communal ephemerality.

The works are placed throughout the space's white halls, with one room for each artist. The exhibition is presented without placards; all the information is provided in a pamphlet. Contributing artist Jennifer Grant offers a quotation from Walter Benjamin: "Real treasure is hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand... in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding." Grant chooses her own interpretation of Benjamin; her only work within the gallery a missable glossy print of found items in a scene of urban decay—tchotchke assembled in an alley, as though the modern viewer would have an association with handicrafts to be severed. Unfortunately, there is no meaning imbued by the juxtaposition.

The next items, from artist Michael White, are without association: enlarged pieces of dried spat-out chewing gum or mud-covered insulation from a demolition site—these things have the fluidity of paint, the movement of sculpture, and the irreducibility of a found object. The room is focused around 'Julius Shokuin', a phallus of twisted asbestos with a glossy geodesic head. The entrancing 'Mask'—its glossy shapes like teeth upon the purple contorted material—does not unwind well into the primitivism of Anna Tanner's paintings in the next room. Blurring the lines between kitsch and idyll, the minute paintings de-contextualize the imagery of the American 1950s; an affected naturalism keeps the works aloof.

Tanner stands out among the Scottish group for having been educated in the United States—she recently returned from Rhode Island Schood of Design—and brings into question the unifying theme of the exhibition. As I was leaving I was pointed towards another work by Grant, this one outside on nearby Craig Close. In the narrow cavern assorted teacups hung in rows down several stories above my head like festival lights from an imagined Edinburgh. The two people walking behind me stopped to admire it - one commenting, "That's cool". All the work needed was context: it's definitely Scottish.