I cannot tell a lie.
When I walked into this new exhibition by rising contemporary art star Brian Griffiths and was faced with a field of grey, shed-like structures, I felt a pang of disappointment. Let loose in the gallery on my own, I wove my way in, out and through this labyrinth of cuboid and spherical structures made of steel and covered with patched grey artist's canvas. Unsure how to react, I lifted up the odd bit of material that skirted limply over the "sheds" and peered underneath. There was nothing to see.
In this makeshift maze, the sound was oddly distorted as the fabric had a deadening effect on the lower part of the space. Another strange side-effect was that I became hyper-aware of the sunlight flashing overhead and the creaking of the wooden joists in the rafters.
You should always expect the unexpected at Tramway, the south side former tram shed that will be hosting the Turner Prize in 2015; but if I am being honest, I had been expecting something more jaunty from Griffiths. His goofy giant panda, seen at Glasgow's Gallery of Modern Art in 2011 as part of the travelling British Art Show 7, made me smile and scratch my head simultaneously.
The 7.5m-wide panda head emerged from a 2007 installation commissioned by London Underground called Life Is A Laugh and was followed by another big boy called Battenburg in 2010. This giant cake made of bricks was shortlisted for the Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth.
The origins of this new work commissioned for Tramway came at the beginning of 2012 with an exhibition called The Invisible Show at the Vilma Gold gallery in London. Owing more than a nod to HG Wells's classic science fiction novella The Invisible Man, in which a former medical student called Griffin swathes himself in bandages as a means of disguising his invisibility, London-based Griffiths has developed the ideas first let loose in this show by responding to this large industrial space.
According to curator Claire Jackson, the analogy with Wells's anti-hero is clear. "But in Brian's case," she adds, "he is working on a monumental scale as opposed to trying to be invisible. The surface of the structures Brian calls 'partials' becomes the focus of attention. He is purposefully drawing attention to the fact that they are illusions."
Griffiths works with what he calls "impoverished" materials and he leaves nothing to chance in choosing his medium. The fact that he has used unstretched artist's canvas as a cover for his structures is deliberate. There are small interventions on the canvas that give them a painterly air.
Jackson says Griffiths describes them as three-dimensional collages and, once you get past the general dreichness of the scene the structures present when you walk into the space, you start to notice the different hues. The flecks and patches almost mirror the floor of Tramway 2, which has seen plenty of action over the years.
"I think it is quite apt that they [the structures] are space fillers," Jackson states. "They challenge that space and how you deal with it. Brian has done something interesting. It's all at eye level but you can't get a sense of viewing it as a whole. There's a real sense of disorientation with it: a foggy, mysterious feeling."
Even though, initially, I felt both irritated and perplexed by this exhibition, I found myself turning it over in my mind's eye days after seeing it.
Like an empty, abandoned building that wears its past life lightly, once you start to look, the shades of grey in this oddly moving exhibition just keep on coming.
Brian Griffiths: Borrowed World, Borrowed Eyes, Tramway 2, Glasgow (0845 330 3501, www.tramway.org) until September 22.
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