They Had Four Years @ Generator Dundee

Entering They Had Four Years, Generator’s pick of last year’s degree shows, a loud mechanical thrumming emanates from a go-kart made from an old crate at the top of a revolving platform, connected to another at the top of a wall. Two racing helmets play recordings of the artist Lily Morris and her father in their carts. Functioning as a link between generations, the piece also subverts the gendered father/son tradition of building together.

Cameron Orr catches the viewer off guard with a lifelike face-down hooded body on the gallery floor. In his sculpture and paintings, he amasses occult symbols and neon squiggles, with childlike naivety. The body ambiguously represents both the images’ maker and victim, illustrating the sense of mystery that pervades Orr's intuitive practice.

Also on the floor, a large screen displays Aaron McCarthy’s GIF-like images of gymnasts stuck spinning for eternity. “Can you imagine enduring centuries?” McCarthy asks in thick cut steel totemic letters. Read together, the works suggest unresolved frustration and longing.

In the second, darkened space is Alima Askew and Timothea Armour’s Earnest Camouflage. This performance-cum-video work explores the Water of Leith via the avatars of a strange grey heron and an even stranger 'Grey Smudge'. Travelling along Edinburgh’s main waterway, they surreally dissect the city’s social and economic history.

Also in this darker space, Sophie Will's ethereal offering comprises of a torch in a box. Refracted through several glass lenses, its light is projected onto a large screen, and as a ghostly reflection on the floor. Wills also displays small nuggets of some unidentifiable, meteoric-looking metals. The result is a quiet and cosmic intervention in the space.

With Morris’s disorientating spinning platforms and Orr’s occult cacophony on display alongside more succinctly lyrical work, Generator’s 'best of 2014' exhibition maintains the degree show dynamic.