Art Review: Gods of small things

Published on Thursday 11 December 2008 19:27

FUTUREPROOF **** STREET LEVEL PHOTOWORKS, GLASGOW SCALES ** CORN EXCHANGE GALLERY, EDINBURGH

SCOTLAND claims to be the birthplace of photography, though our endeavours to celebrate this with a dedicated museum have been slow to get off the ground. However, surely the test of a country's mettle is not in the past but in the talent we're producing in the present.

When I saw the Jerwood Photography Awards exhibition not long ago, in this same gallery, I noted that all five shortlisted artists were graduates of the London College of Communication. What of young photographers in Scotland? Now, as if in answer to my question, here is a showcase, Futureproof, of four new graduates from Scottish photography courses. All four have interesting material, and an attentiveness to detail and craft in how they explore it.

Katrina Johnk is a bit of a voyeur, but then which of us can walk down a street at night and resist the temptation to look in a lighted window? Her photographs, taken through the windows of Edinburgh tenements, must have been carefully crafted, yet appear spontaneous. How ordered and ideal lives look when glimpsed in this way: the smiling parents and the well-adjusted kids, the unguarded glimpses of intimacy, like the woman cradling a small child. The girl faces away from us, but her smile in the mirror opposite engages us completely. Johnk makes voyeurs of all of us, while reminding us that that is all we are. The window frame permanently separates us from knowing the reality of those lives we peek at.

Martin Scott Powell is also interested in voyeurs, and in viewers. He places a Witness, a single, identical stationary figure, in a series of landscapes. They are detailed, immersive depictions of place, but they are changed by the presence of the observer. Somehow our attention is drawn to the human traces: the crumbling foundations of an old pier next to the beach, the ruined stone pillars in the forest. It's a clever way of drawing attention to the way we read images.

Victoria Baker shares something of the interest in absence and presence. Her series, Surrounding Affection, explores the sterile spaces of institutional buildings. Yet these clean, angular corridors and atriums have great suggestive potential. A plump sack of laundry or a scrap of toilet graffiti suggest human presence; a couple of abandoned wheelchairs and a trolley bed communicate the idea of "hospital" more effectively than a picture of a busy ward. This is a large series, and some of these images are more successful than others, but the cumulative effect is powerful enough.

Mike Hunter stands out because his work includes an element of fun. He plays with scale, using real landscapes – a railway siding next to a housing estate, a parking lot in Edinburgh Park – as backdrops for the actions of his miniature commando figures. I don't know what technological trickery he has used to achieve this, but the men really do appear life-size. Seeing them preparing for a stand-off in such familiar places is not only fun, it's a little bit sinister too.

In fact, Hunter's work would be ideal material to put in Scales, at Leith's Corn Exchange, where curator Jay Murphy brings together three international artists who are concerned with notions of scale and amplification.

Gregory Chatonsky's interactive machine will take your fingerprint and show you a vastly enlarged version on a screen. Then, before your eyes, the lines will start to pull apart. After a few minutes it is no more than a pattern of abstract lines. It's somewhat more interesting than his other work here, a vastly magnified photograph of a finger's surface, straight from the school of "ordinary things look really interesting under a microscope". They do for a short time, but it isn't really enough to sustain a work of art.

Sculptor Michael Rees shows several miniature versions of works that also exist as very large sculptures. His strange, multi-legged creatures have the delicacy of the miniaturist about them, but there is nothing new – or particularly interesting – about a sculptor using maquetes. The sense of contrast isn't conveyed, unless it is in the animated film, which wasn't working when I visited.

New Yorker Michael Zanksy has worked as a production and set designer on a stack of Hollywood movies, from Godzilla to Fatal Attraction. The works he shows here are photographs, strange tableaux featuring dolls, porcelain figures and sculpted busts, characters engaged in sinister little dramas atmospherically shot in semi-darkness. They are the most intriguing works in a show which has a tendency to claim to be something bigger than it is. Then again, perhaps that is another way of playing with the concept of scale.

&149 Futureproof until 20 December; Scales until 18 December