Nature's playground

GIRPOWER & BOYHOOD ****

TALBOT RICE GALLERY

PLAYING BEYOND THE HA HA***
THE EMBASSY

ANDREW MACKENZIE: DELICATE GROUND ****
AMBER ROOME CONTEMPORARY ART

Staging a group show with a theme is a tricky business. Not only is it a huge logistical challenge, there is the question of who to select and how to display it. Do you choose works which complement or contrast? Do you lead the viewer through a carefully prepared argument, or throw as much work as possible at the subject and see what sticks?

The Talbot Rice's ambitious festival show, Girlpower & Boyhood, seems to combine both approaches, bringing together artists from Britain, Europe and the United States who work with themes of fairytale and fantasy. Curators Pat Fisher from the Talbot Rice and Lene Burkard from the Kunsthallen Brandts in Denmark have created such a feast for the imagination that the viewer is in danger of being overwhelmed.

Enrico David's striking embroidered figure, Dinnisblumen, acts as the show's figurehead, an androgynous dancer in high heels, his/her face a flower-shaped mask. Like Puck he/she beckons us in, an audacious master of ceremonies, setting the tone for the whole show. This will be about men and women, he seems to say, about childhood and adulthood, about fantasies and nightmares. And it just might be fun, too.

Kiki Smith's prints strike a similar balance. Pool of Tears 2, a charming image of a girl swimming for land accompanied by a Noah's Ark's worth of animals, might be straight from the pages of a children's story. Other works explore Little Red Riding Hood as a coming-of-age myth, dark sexualised images which culminate in girl and grandmother seeming to rise from the slit belly of the wolf.

The large paintings of Kathrine Ærtebjerg pull towards surrealism, their smiling serene female figures in a dream-landscape overlaid by dripping paint, while startling monochrome beings lurk behind the plants. Sandra Scolnik mines the subconscious, too, with her doll's house of figures, all with the same face, as does Louise Bourgeois with her images of mothers and spiders.

Some of the artists paint landscapes in which fantasies happen, evocative empty stages like Simon Keenleyside's woods at night, Paula Kane's gorgeous Tolkien-ish landscape of mountains and trees, and Jana Gunstheimer's evocative interiors. There are so many big, colourful works in this show that it's easy to miss the tiny gems of Scottish painter Christopher Orr, which tell their own quiet stories.

Others are influenced by graphic art: Trine Boesen's urban nightmares, skyscrapers dwarfed by giant mushrooms and spiders' webs, Eske Kath's bright flat canvases of a suburbia fractured by fire and flood. Vanessa Phaff creates a Lara Croft-like figure who stars in her own dramas, but is she the heroine or the victim?

It is to the curators' credit that this show never becomes, as it so easily could, a ponderous diatribe about the dark side of fairytale. It's a feast for the imagination, ending on a deliberately light note with Hernan Bas's kitschy carpet design with a languid young man in an oyster-shell boat pulled by swans. It's a feast for the imagination, and judging by the heated conversations of other visitors, arguing about the images and their meanings, it's providing plenty of food for thought.

The curators at The Embassy, whose show Playing Beyond the Ha Ha is part of the third Annuale, a showcase of artist-run projects, explore a similar theme, the idea of play as it applies in adult life. Tonya McMullan is perhaps the most playful, with a jewellery collection made out of silver paper and biro drawings displayed in a glass cabinet, and a chandelier made from Magic Tree car fresheners (it smells quite potent). It's harder to see how Sarah Cameron's pencil drawings of urban landscapes relate to the theme, though they are well worth seeing. Neil Davidson's Thermos Museum, however, steals the show, a homespun celebration of that nerdiest of gadgets, the Thermos flask. It sends up the whole museum idea with a glorious seriousness, from the audio-guide and the "under repair" area to the shaky-looking security camera. There are retro flasks, flasks with corporate logos, flasks from around the world, a fragment of a broken flash found on a beach, and even a flask which opens to conceal a makeshift bomb. It's a supreme piece of artistic geekiness: adult play doesn't get much more fun than this.

Meanwhile, another ambitious group show is staged at Graham Russell's Atticsalt Gallery, which was established nearly two years ago to promote contemporary art from Europe. Curated by Ken Pratt, Everybody Comes to Holyrood brings together artists from Europe and North America on the theme of celebrity and our obsession with it.

The curatorial logic of this show is less clear, with some of the most intriguing work - Angie Reed's confession box, Tai Shani's disturbing film Take Me Back, Arif Ozacka's small, violent paintings - seeming to have only a glancing relation to the theme. It isn't clear why Janice McNab's painting Morning is included, though it is a fine piece of work.

Ross Sinclair's slogan T-shirts, however, seem to have something to say wherever they are, and Jemima and Dolly Brown are right on the money with their cat-supermodel hybrid collapsed in a corner on a pile of old duvets, and Jemima's angel suspended from the ceiling festooned with plastic flowers.

Martin C de Waal's photographs of women subvert glamour, being shot at odd angles which suggest they are stumbling or falling, while Ursula Mayer's film of a woman in a silk dress moving through a glassy modernist landscape is powerfully juxtaposed with her book Fallen Imperial, detailing the conquests of a call girl in a luxury hotel.

If group shows seem to pull the mind in several directions at once, Andrew Mackenzie's solo show at Amber Roome has a certain edgy tranquillity. Mackenzie's work is shifting from abstraction towards moody contemporary landscapes, skeletal tree forms layered against richly coloured backgrounds.

Sometimes a faint line of buildings remains where one has been painted then removed, the ghost of a street lamp, a pavement, a pylon. Titles like Underpass and Winter New Build, which sometimes appear in the paintings in copperplate, speak of unseen man-made presences which only increase the desolation, like a lone tree in an urban wasteland.

Mackenzie interacts with the historical idea of landscape; some of these paintings follow the most traditional of rules, a vista framed by trees, although the trees frame nothing but colour.

In Artificial Paradise, a fallen tree lurches towards another against a blood red sky which seems illuminated by lightning, cutting off the middle distance. It's beautiful and unsettling, paradise perhaps, but poised on the edge of a darker, more threatening world.

• Girlpower & Boyhood until 30 September; Playing Beyond The Ha Ha until 3 September; Everybody Comes to Holyrood until 2 September; Andrew Mackenzie until 7 September