Elisabeth Mahoney 

No Small Feat

Streetlevel Photoworks, Glasgow ***
  
  


At three days, Alison Hayes's son looks like a minuscule rock star, a tiny Thom Yorke with a mad shock of hair. His eyes, large, deep, dark pools, sparkle out from the incubator. A later image in the series shows him as he is now - a few years old, his hair now a tamer blonde flop. You don't see his disability straight away, but when you do, the full impact of those shots from so soon after birth reveals itself. In those, he isn't shown to be disabled and we don't see him as such. The point is: it's the same child, full of magic and promise. Deftly, quietly, Hayes prompts us to think about how we look and at what point precisely we reach for labels.

Her photographs are one of the highlights in this show of lens-based work exploring the theme of parenthood. Much of it is engaging in the ways we might expect - deeply personal, a tad sentimental - but several works have other, more complex resonances.

Calum Angus Mackay's work is lushly personal. These dreamy black-and-white photographs, all soft distortion like a reflection in moving water, capture a day at "Frog River" with his children. The manipulation of the image looks hi-tech until you realise he has used a lens made from a jam jar. Sam Ainsley's digital image, "My son's heart cloned six hundred and seventy-two times", makes a thing of beauty, a sheet of lustrous blood-red colour, from that almost obsessive parental love - one which will countenance doing anything, 672 times, for the child.

Two works in particular startle. Gillian Steel and her child play together, naked, with Steel cast as a mother ape, for photographic series in which the mother strips away "all those social niceties I had spent my life getting good at". In Karen Vaughan's embroidered silkscreens, the human presence is entirely absent. Empty, tidy rooms are drab and drained of life except for a child's toys and books. As in the rest of the exhibition, all the colour and energy of life lies with the next generation.

• Until August 11. Details: 0141-552 2151.

 

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