Coinciding delightfully with both the pre-Copenhagen surge of hope and the post-Copenhagen anti-humanist reality, the second of the three annual GlaxoSmithKline Contemporary seasons purports to ‘create an exhibition that is close to the edge, bravely metamorphosing “issue” and “art”, whilst beautiful, powerful and thought-provoking’.

Apart from the fact that willingly describing something as ‘close to the edge’ is unimaginably irritating, the statement also manages to be misleading when applied to the work on show, apart from the few works that can undoubtedly be termed beautiful. Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt’s Black Rain epitomizes a beauty that is ineffable in a bleak kind of way, with a rebarbative attraction to the ugly that salvages the whole exhibition and is palpably present in Edward Burtnysky’s chromatic photographs. Projected into a darkened two-storey space Black Rain is a monochrome film made from raw visual data recorded by NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory. Snowy footage rains down with a static crackling that unnerves our romantic sentiment whilst rationally describing the impersonal, awesome and explicitly inhuman mass which lies beyond the Earth. Set in outer-space, Black Rain’s antithetical relationship to even the most ‘meta’ themes of Earth is surely worryingly oblique.

This problem punctuates the whole exhibition. Most of the works were either not about climate change originally - such as Gormley’s recycled Amazonian Field or Cornelia Parker’s The Heart of Darkness, inspired by Florida, Al Gore and the US voting system - or only very indirectly applicable to climate change, for example Sophie Calle’s wonderfully warm fabulation North Pole. The discordancy produced by attempting to tenuously link 36 artists to one capacious theme is summed up by Tracey Emin’s trademark neon-plus-delicately-embroidered (with crass sentiment) linen I loved you like the sky: ‘created especially for the exhibition’, therefore automatically relevant to the theme? This means that the climate change ball is truly in the viewer’s court, leaving us squinting and squirming to invest the work with appropriate ‘earthy’ meaning: it’s almost a test to see who can rinse their arts degree waffle to the most decadent ends.

Unfortunately the incompatibility of the works to the theme is not the only negative point. There are some truly awful pieces such as Kris Martin’s gold time-bomb, 100 Years, and Adriane Colburn’s Up from Under the Edge of the Earth which can only be described as an over-sized pastiche of tacky wallpaper from Homebase. But then there’s Yao Lu’s incredible trompe l’oeil landscape Spring in the City which initially looks like a traditional oriental watercolour but proves to be a degraded hybrid of waste and digital imagery. And Mariele Neudecker’s, 400 Thousand Generations, whose inverted eyeballs enclose up-turned snowy mountains which drip sadly like discarded snowglobes, evoking issues of vision but also of memory and how important its function will become for what will soon be a lost landscape.

The exhibition houses some poignant pieces which, alongside the fantastic installation of the works, the skillfully executed lighting and the well-crafted (and free) little information book, produces an enjoyable show which draws attention to the well-aired issues of climate change. It’s just a pity the works are forced into an ill-fitting theme and sponsored by a pharmaceutical giant which surely has as much interest in saving the world as it has in the people who inhabit it.

Until Jan 31

FIONNUALA CAVANAGH