YOU can't go far in a modern European city without encountering pigeons, depending on how you look at it, they are either winged vermin or the doughty survivors of the urban jungle.
At the centre of Alex Heim's new body of work for Doggerfisher is
a film where the artists follows pigeons, walking calmly amid the pedestrians on a railway station concourse, climbing the granite steps of a civic building, pecking among the feet of the coffee drinkers at Costa. It's a bird's eye view of our city, but not the one we expect.
This is the first solo in the UK for Heim, a young German artist who studied at Goldsmiths and now works in London. It operates best as a complete body of work that draws on the overlooked corners of the urban environment. Around the film is a series of papier-mache sculptures made from discarded London newspapers, and painted to look like graffiti-streaked concrete. It evokes the kind of neglected urban spaces that are neither completely wild nor entirely domesticated. Pigeon territory.
A series of ceramic bowls, mounted on the wall like musical notes on a stave, seem to capture the colours that appear unexpectedly in an oil-streaked puddle. And there is a series of close-up photographs of sections of pavement that at first seem reminiscent of the Boyle family's meticulous studies of random patches of ground. But Heim has chosen his pavements carefully, highlighting the patterns made by paving slabs or patched concrete, the white marks of chewing gum. He is making us look, really look, at the ground we walk on every day.
Transforming how we see the urban environment is also an interest of Richard Wilson, but where Heim is looking at details in pavements and following pigeons, the things you easily overlook, Wilson is at the opposite end of the scale, creating big, bold interventions you couldn't miss even if you were trying.
Turning the Place Over is a sculpture created using the facade of an empty office block in Liverpool, where he cut an ovoid section from the wall and rotated it, a nod to 1960s New York artist Gordon Matta-Clark. But Wilson uses technology to take it further, producing a disconcerting film taken from the edge of the rotating concrete. The Grey Gallery's old warehouse space off Barony Street feels like the most appropriate location to see it.
Wilson's works often have an element of pace and danger. Meter's Running is a film that shows a man cutting his way out through the back of a moving taxi. Break Neck Speed, made in Yokohama for the Triennial, shows a lighted fuse shooting out of the back of a trailer, whizzing through empty warehouses and past lorries until it sets in motion a series of small explosions.
Wilson is interested by the processes of making and destroying, and how similar they sometimes seem. His film Butterfly shows a crushed Cessna aircraft being gradually pulled back into shape like a fragile winged creature emerging from its shiny chrysalis, while the main sculptural work here is Hot Dog Roll, a burger van sliced apart and put back together at crazy angles, a work of both destruction and creation.
Irish artist Ian Healy is engaged in a more ideological battle in his show at Atticsalt, targeting religious belief in all its forms with the fervour of Richard Dawkins. He has painted a series of Hollywood actors who have played priests – Marcello Mastroianni, Robert Mitchum, Bing Crosby – apparently to illustrate how easy it is to dress in religious garb but be a complete sham. A painting of Dracula actor Bela Lugosi as Christ in a passion play seems to have the same aim, but it becomes something rather more poignant.
Healy's paintings are clearly more about concept than paint quality. Not unlike Warhol, he is using portraits to illustrate (and undermine) ideas: radical Islamist Louis Farrakhan, scientology founder L Ron Hubbard and 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta are all subject.
But by far the best works here are the "trinity" of charcoal drawings: Padre Pio, the "stigmata man", whose shaggy beard evokes photographs of terror suspects; Richard Chamberlain as Father Ralph in The Thorn Birds, the priest-as-love-interest, and Joseph Ratzinger, the current Pope, as a young man in the uniform of the anti-aircraft brigade in Nazi Germany.
These are complex works, perhaps more complex than he intends. When we look at Joseph we see beyond the uniform to the intelligent but vulnerable eyes of a young man. There is a lesson here about the power of subtlety and skill. Religious belief is a persistent and complex phenomenon, and art that engages with it, even antagonistically, needs to acknowledge that complexity. A bit more subtlety and a bit less tub-thumping would have made this a stronger exhibition.
• Alexander Heim until 13 September; Richard Wilson until 31 August; Ian Healy until 30 August.
