The Ingleby Gallery‘s current exhibition, Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing, centers a selection of contemporary art around what the gallery asserts to be the theme of transformation. Francis Alys‘ Paradox of Praxis I (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) headlines the exhibition. The video documents Alys pushing a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melts and ultimately disappears. While superficially inane, the action poignantly demonstrates the often meaningless nature of humanity’s travails. In the end, Alys’ act can be seen to celebrate the nothingness it reveals.

Transformation is manifest squarely in the gallery with Peter Liversidge’s Cohen versus California. The large floral tribute reading “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric” changes over the period of the exhibition as the chrysanthemums decay and fall from the work, pointing to temporality as well as the multiplicity of meaning found within the quotation. In Liversidge’s A Pair of Kestrels we see the very literal transformation of the body from life to death through the juxtaposition of a taxidermied kestrel and its skeleton.

Cornelia Parker’s Thirty Pieces of Silver (Exhaled) (Water Jug) transforms silver from primarily utilitarian into the purely aesthetic. Iran do Espirito Santo (whose work was featured at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2000 as well as the Istanbul Biennal in 2000) also alters the everyday in his Can series. Espirito Santo aggrandizes the can by superimposing its enlarged form upon black granite, elevating it to the realm of sculpture.

The paintings of Callum Innes and Alexander and Susan Maris negate the additive nature of painting. Innes creates minimal images on blackened canvases through “unpainting” or removing pigment. Alexander and Susan Maris cover canvases in gray pigment containing the ashes of Jacques Derrida’s text The Truth in Painting.

Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing is on view at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh through 28 March 2009.