Elisabeth Mahoney 

Su Grierson

Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow ***
  
  


Given the sinister subject matter of Su Grierson's new work - the presence of vast power stations, including nuclear, in otherwise idyllic rural landscapes - its visual allure comes as something of a surprise. The first thing you notice about this series of digitally manipulated photographs and video works is their serene beauty, the sheen and gloss of the prints. The second thing you notice is that you are swooning over images dominated by chunky, brooding, windowless complexes - terrible blots on the landscape, of course, but rendered hallucinatorily sublime here.

This isn't a new approach to the monstrous landmarks of progress and Grierson is not the first to appreciate our contradictory response to them, somewhere between transfixed admiration and deep-rooted terror. Derek Jarman's garden, in the shadow of Dungeness, showed that he also understood this quality. Yet Grierson imbues her subject with poignancy, especially in her prints, and these are technically impressive images.

Video stills of a Stirlingshire acid works focus on the factory's emissions into the beautiful landscape that surrounds it, bathing the noxious plumes in deep yellow; the sky at the fishing village of Port Seton, with Cockenzie power station looming behind, is flooded in an acrid red. A pair of prints of Dounreay show the ground in front of the fast reactors to be a burning, deadly shade of red, like the surface of Mars; the land around an ethylene plant in Fife becomes a dystopian wilderness under a milky, pale-green sky. In each of these Grierson succeeds in her aim of seducing us visually before we quite realise the troubling things we are looking at.

Hence the exhibition's title, Eyeshine, an Australasian term referring to the gleam of a hunter's torch reflecting off a crocodile's eye. The prints may be reminiscent of 1970s album cover designs by Hypnosis (her image of Torness recalls the sleeve of Pink Floyd's Animals), and the video works here may be less diverting, but the prints, in all their doom-laden, dreamy and nightmarish beauty, still have some bite.

• Until June 30. Details: 0141-552 2151.

 

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