Press

In Tender Scene at the Changing Room in Stirling, curated by the artist Alex Pollard, monochrome is a visual theme – floorboards painted alternately black and white, sections of dense black-and-white patterned wallpaper. But the finished result is anything but dull.

It’s a carefully thought-out show, even if the highlight – despite all Pollard’s intentions – are his own paintings; three new works in a series of anthropomorphic images made using distorted pictures of make-up containers, which first emerged in his recent solo show at the Talbot Rice. These come together with the work of three other young artists from Glasgow around the theme of melancholia, the gothic, the theatrical. Pollard’s jesters and sad clowns are clearly a part of this, as are Clare Stephenson’s drawings of drag queens - goddesses? game show hosts? – who seem to be acting out their own stories. Prior knowledge of Fiona Jardine’s work is required in order to understand her slight pair of photographs in this context, while Gregor Wright makes paintings and sculpture that seem to revel in giving us incomplete information and watching us fail to decode it. His Mega Eye painting watches the viewer down the length of the gallery as we try to make sense of his part-figurative sculpture, Metamorph. Like those in Pale Carnage, these are challenging works, the links between them more obvious to artists and curators than to members of the public. The works talk to one another, but elliptically, sometimes in a language impenetrable to the layman. But they do talk, and that in itself makes Tender Scene the more satisfying show of the two.