RSA New Contemporaries 2015

A spectacle-laden opening. Deb Marshall’s sound installation Kairos I thunders over the tourist traffic of Princes St, while upon entry, Erin Fairley’s work projects a taut orange web over the main stairway. Elsewhere Fairley’s rope installations are photographed extending over lochs and hills— peaceful alien diagrams on dreich wilds. Closer to the city, Robbie Hamilton has installed a wooden skatepark in his space: minimalist sculpture with a function. In these august surroundings and in dialogue with the architectural models on exhibition, the ‘drawings’ made by his wheel-marks on the walls feel like a pleasingly bold, political gesture – against the institutional prescriptions of the art space, as well as urban space.

It emerges that much of the best work is sculptural, although often pervaded by an attractively clean, conceptual aesthetic which can sometimes feel more safely art-historical (by way of the 60s) than contemporary. Still, highlights include the playful formalist motifs of Tim Dalzell’s SketchUp-inspired model seaside, Robbie Hamilton’s plywood quarter-pipes, and the simplistic but muscular conceptualism of Ben Martin’s Line and Weight: a rope and steel sculpture which amply fulfils the promises of its title.

Painting is less strongly represented, although Seamus Killick’s Premium Fingernails, a series of 83 works on MDF, are imaginative and obsessive, crude and funny little pieces. A gallery away, Cameron Orr’s mixed media assemblages grin back with irreverent mischief. Also worth seeing are Hannah Clarkson-Dornan’s poultry diptych – some deftly executed kitsch – and Alex Kuusik’s enigmatic loom-woven Dullard Gene canvases. Both lost their work in the Mackintosh fire last May.

Of the few video works on show in the lower gallery, Edward Humphrey’s metaphysical contemplations through borrowed speech in Another Fiction is an ambitious and essayistic work which deserves attentive viewing.

It feels like a good year for the RSA’s annual ‘best of’ exhibition of Scottish degree shows, which offers a promising glimpse of the generation to come, in a time when trying to make it as an artist seems a more precarious vocation (or simply requiring more blind conviction) than ever before. [Gary Zhexi Zhang]