For his first solo outing in the UK, Doves, Alexander Heim has focussed firmly on the dull, dreary world he sees around him. It’s not clear whether Heim is offering an encomium to the poured concrete and pe­b­ble­dash of the suburbs and city centre, or is happily resigned to the drab fate of the modern city-dweller. At times he seems keen to show the quirks that undermine the plodding efforts of the town planners, screening sur­veil­lance footage of a scrappy pigeon going about its business in a railway station concourse, and doc­u­ment­ing ungainly col­l­i­sions of paving stones and tarmac in pho­to­graphs that call to mind Boyle Family’s me­t­ic­u­lous re­cre­a­tions. The Doves of the show’s title are more cel­e­b­rat­ory. These three gunmetal grey winged sculp­tures in papier mâché, propped up with breeze blocks, are mono­l­ith­ic - a Concrete Henge, if you like, bound to puzzle future ar­che­o­lo­gists. Adding to the ambiguity, Heim also shows a set of beau­ti­fully crafted bowls, their interior surfaces puddled with enamel glazes in deep blue, green and purple. These careful, de­lib­er­ate objects, hanging just so on the gallery wall, at first look like a coun­ter­point to the half-hearted Brutalism of the Doves, but by offering up something pretty for visitors to look at, Heim seems to be asking his audience to look again at the more un­pre­pos­sess­ing work here, not to mention the world outside the gallery, and find beauty in it too.

At Edinburgh print­makers Chad McCail is looking to the world around him as well, but with an an­a­lyt­ic­al eye, exploring social mores and global politics through a cartoon filter, crafting a world peopled by ‘wealthy parasites, robots and zombies’, McCail’s parodic labels for the upper, middle and working classes.

Com­puls­ory Education is a concise history in cartoon strip form of the school system, which McCail presents as a tool of the military-in­dus­tri­al complex. A series of captions, tell the story, from the defeat of the Prussian army at the Battle of Jena, to that state’s adoption of com­puls­ory schooling in a bid to create a gen­er­a­tion of “obedient soldiers”, ending with a table of European countries which adopted the Prussian academic model. Whether or not you buy into McCail’s re­vi­sion­ist analysis of education as a method of social control, one thing is certain: this is a moving work, and, therefore, con­v­in­cing. The zombie children, taught to “obey orders” in factory-like in­sti­tu­tions, and their robot peers, charged to “learn more so they can transmit commands”, are as cute as a button, and McCail draws scenes with a pared down comic ef­fi­ci­ency, rendering Prussian victories over France and Austria as wealthy parasites pros­trat­ing them­selves before other, identical wealthy parasites as robots look on and zombies do the dirty work. There’s a pleasing irony to this audience ma­n­ip­u­la­tion - McCail’s critique uses the methods of the very system he denounces, borrowing the tactics of cartoons, which, from Nazi anti-Semitic ca­r­i­c­a­tures to the recent Danish con­tro­ver­sy, have long been at the vanguard of the pro­pa­ganda war.

In re­la­tion­ships grow stronger and the Puberty series, McCail adopts a different style, this time based on the line drawings of children’s textbooks and edu­c­a­tion­al pamphlets. The shift in style marks a shift in tone, with McCail doc­u­ment­ing his Utopian vision for a society in which issues of sexuality, social re­s­pon­s­ib­il­ity and gender are discussed openly, with knowledge passed freely between the gen­er­a­tions. re­la­tion­ships grow stronger sees a gang of teens being waved off by their mum, dad and grandma, on their way to plant a tree, which, bizarrely, is festooned with male and female genitalia. Partly a metaphor for budding sexuality, the scene also suggests a possible ritual for marking the tran­s­i­tion from childhood to adulthood, a theme explored further in the Puberty prints, which show kids and grown ups ra­tion­ally dis­cuss­ing the contents of a porn mag, adults calming an angry parent who has caught two teenagers kissing (he’s so angry, he’s tran­s­form­ing into a bear), and a man giving a boy a knife, re­co­g­n­ising his ability to use it safely. This is strange stuff, and, like the cartoon pieces, curiously affecting. And that’s what makes McCail’s work so strong - in matching simple styles with complex politics, he manages to engage heart and mind alike.

There’s more com­plex­ity, more twisting of reality, and more de­cept­ively simple tactics at play in 39, the debut show by Edinburgh-based artist Hugh Brady. Brady has converted his mews studio into a cool and con­sider­ed essay on the role of the artist, re­p­res­ent­a­tions of artists in popular culture, the self-reflexive nature of the art world, the clichés of con­tem­por­ary art and the business of making art. The glue that binds this ambitious exhibit together is Michelan­gelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up. The entrance to the show bears the same sign that graces the pho­to­graph­ic studio in which much of the film is set, and the beams from the fictional studio’s door are painted over the beams of Brady’s real studio door, while a dual-screen video piece lifts interior scenes for the film, filling the upper floor of the building with the sound of star David Hemmings’ footsteps on a floor which Brady has, in­ev­it­ably, recreated here. A flood of allusions to per­en­n­i­ally hip or currently vogue-ish art and artists follows. A section of wall has been removed in a nod to Gordon Matta-Clark, the exposed bricks splashed with silver, calling to mind Richard Serra’s molten lead splashes (and his role in Mathew Barney’s Cremaster 3). There is a glibly min­im­al­ist painting of a canvas stretcher, taken from a pho­to­graph of Warhol’s studio, and artlessly installed fluor­es­cent strip lights as a homage to Dan Flavin, or in parody of the sort of artists who pay homage to Dan Flavin. A concrete sculpture looks like the sort of art that borrows from ar­chi­tec­ture, but turns out to be a genuine maquette rescued from a skip outside an ar­chi­tects office. On the walls, abstract min­im­al­ist patterns ape the work of Daniel Buren, but are in fact patterns borrowed from bathroom tiles seen Federico Fellin’s 8 1/2 (also released in 1966). This parade of de­lib­er­ately obvious re­f­er­ences matched with an attempt to travel through time, eliding truth and fiction on the way, by layering London then over Edinburgh now might sound like the stuff of a pre­ten­tious philo­so­phy undergrad’s wet dream, but Brady manages to pull it off. This is in part thanks to his re­strained palette of three colours - black, white and silver - that acts as a sort of sturdy aesthetic bridge between works, but is mostly down to Brady’s nuanced un­der­stand­ing of the ex­hib­i­tion space and his re­la­tion­ship to it, which makes for a show that is, for all its con­cep­tu­al toing and froing, a deeply personal attempt to come to terms with the di­f­fi­culties of making art, here and now, in this par­t­ic­u­lar place.

Alexander Heim: Doves is at do­g­ger­fish­er­ until 13th September, Chad McCail is at Edinburgh Print­makers until 6th Septmeber and Hugh Brady: 39 is at 16B Lennox Street Lane until 25th August. This review was first published in The Herald on 22nd August , 2008.