In the new group exhibition at Union Gallery – Streetlife – there is an enjoyably strange work by the Glasgow-based painter Frank McNab.
It shows a headscarfed woman laden with shopping in mid-air in the void at the centre of a tenement's common stair.
McNab says he's drawn to these spaces – neither quite indoors nor out, home or abroad – but the ambiguities redouble as one starts to wonder whether the woman depicted here is falling, floating or ascending.
Is she even alive? On closer inspection, that cadaverous face suggests she may be a domestic spectre. Or that this vision may be some projection of herself, her wish not – for once – to have to trudge with her quotidian or heartfelt burdens up the turning stair.
The work is titled 'Oh for the Years I Have not Lived But Only Dreamed of Living', which helps a little but doesn't ground the painting in any one definitive interpretation.
I find its blood and nicotine-coloured suggestions touching, creepy and evocative, and it was one of my picks in a show featuring several strong works by both established and emerging talents.
Of particular local interest is the collage below by Lucy Jones. The energetic diagonals of '31 Drummond Place' perhaps match the urgent fiddle bowing required by the sheet music which partially comprises the image. This was the address of author Compton Mackenzie, for whom such Scottish folk tunes were a particular favourite, and whose lively life and times did much to re-energise the stately formality of the New Town.
This reviewer has singled out Adam Kennedy's work before for its mixture of accurate draughtsmanship tinged with something altogether more difficult to pin down. He has a knack for capturing the decomposition of hard forms, the way they seem to concentrate the lives of all those mortal consciousnesses which once used or viewed them.
In this case, 'Shell of Old Glasgow' remains, like some dissolving corpse – material and ghostly, empty and haunted by fading memory and associations.
Katie Pope interest in the urban realities of West Coast Scotland had the potential to be among the grittier works on show here, but the one which caught my eye – 'Late Night Shoppers' – is if anything rather celebratory. It captures perfectly a sense of rain-soaked glitter and excitement, in which any visual distinctions between buildings, light and people are beautifully blurred.
Finally, I'll draw to your attention something which doesn't really belong in this show at all: James Newton Adams's sculpture 'Wader'.
I love its ingenious simplicity, its contradictory evocation of natural form in metal plates, its unselfconscious poise and mythic irreducibility. It says a great deal with the minimum of fuss. AM
Streetlife continues at the Union Gallery (45 Broughton Street) until 1 March.