open to change

Many months ago I had seen the descriptions of the individual works in the original "Open To Change" proposal. This hadn't prepared me for the multiple resonances which bind the works together into a true show by a group rather than a mere group show.

Issues and images echo across the gallery spaces:

• The iconography of lingerie as a capture and liberation of desire appears in the works by Carol Mason, Val Shatwell and Karen Strang.
• Paul Eames' "My Favourite Shirt" moves from the intimacy of the private to a more public celebration of desire.
• If Peter Russell's Green Room stands apart, re-created as a contemplative chamber from the space above the central square of the Old Arcade, its "tasteful" fur fabric wrapping is anticipated in Karen Strang's wrapping of the shop window space opening onto the Old Arcade. As above, so below...

My expectations for the show were that the Hanging Together group's intention to draw on the past of the Changing Room would jar with The Changing Room's white-wall gallery norms - the particular local would be privileged over the unsituated universal. Curiously, the final form of the exhibition conforms much more than would have been expected to the norms of a Changing Room show.

The show is, I think, very successful as a gallery exhibition. It includes pieces which would stand as works in any exhibition space. Part of the reason might be that the artists themselves have made a considerable investment - in finance as in commitment - in realising the works, whereas past Hanging Together works made a virtue out of lack of resources and were constructed from whatever materials were to hand with no expectation of durability.

But the gallery situation itself conspires to spurn the return which might have been expected from this investment: in discussion, criticism from a wide audience. Hanging Together's past works in unexpected locations have, at the least, generated perplexed attitudes in viewers. The acceptance of a gallery situation in this case produces an inwardness which was missing from these previous initiatives. Quixotic they may have been, but there were these unexpected encounters which seldom arise in a gallery. The gallery instead recalls nothing so much as its own marginality, whether to the town or to the wider artistic community which so seldom look beyond the Scottish cities.

I hope that Hanging Together can build on the success of this venture and, once more, go out into the world beyond the gallery.

A Dickson