Min Angel @ Corn Exchange Gallery

Exploring the grey areas of life, language and perception through a mixure of drawings, sculpture and collage, artist Min Angel delves into the art of making art. Linguistic relationships and the analysis of the ‘non-everydayness of everyday things’ are all touched upon in Poise, her fist solo exhibition, held at the Corn Exchange Gallery, Edinburgh.

In the series Cross-hatched Void Drawings she plays on the ambiguity between the positive and negative marks on the paper. There is an abstract painterly feel to the graph collages, a succession of colourful bar charts, focusing on the blurring between spoken words and the act of making. Bucketing, a vibrant stack of pound shop plastic buckets offers an intriguing display of Duchampian aesthetics mixed with an exploration into linguistic form. Grabs, an enlarged version of the hanging handles found on public buses offers a warped perspective on a familiar object and leaves you with the overwhelming desire to swing off it.

Perhaps it is this act of questioning the everyday and picking up on the ignored or unnoticed aspects of daily life and word relations that creates an uncanny reminiscence of childhood curiosity. The big wooden structure, Fetch, seems to resemble a kitschy climbing frame. The cross-hatch voids are similar to the childhood classroom escapisms doodled onto exercise books and the graphs evoke an underlying memory of laborious maths homework.

The works contain humour and a deliberate naivety, at times reminiscent of conceptual art of the late 1960s in their playful exploration of art's relationship with language, nonetheless offeing a fresh, contemporary feel. This is an interesting exhibition by an emerging artist and worth getting down to Leith for a look.