It’s hard to make a gallery as small as Cockburn Street’s Collective feel empty, but this round of the New Work Scotland exhibition manages it. There is a lot of whitewashed wall here, and a lot of concrete floor, which past exhibitors have used to their advantage, but which only serves to make the first collection, from Jack McConville, look dwarfed.

It’s a shame, since the work itself is interesting, taking classical nude poses and putting them in Matisse’s bright, blocky colours. The addition of a black bar across the eyes of each figure is reminiscent of a shamed defendant in a newspaper article, which draws our attention to the changing attitude towards nude images in the public eye.

Further in, Ash Reid’s handful of works have us turning between two low-quality television screens as whispered memories and disconnected statements sustain the feeling of being in a huge space with someone standing just behind your shoulder.

Reid is interested in hypnosis and the stage between sleeping and wakefulness; certainly this kind of fluid reality is present in her videos, while digital prints on the walls are lifeless and hesitant. The body of work itself holds together well, with nice interlinking domestic articles featured on walls, floor and on tape; but the overall feel is one of a strange emptiness.

A third room-turned-cinema has works from Amelia Bywater and Christian Newby, which have to be looked at together, difficult as this may be. In the darkened room it is easy to watch Historic Plays Dissolving Songbook, a 34-minute-long silent video of a selection of short scenes. It is less easy to view the other work, entitled Rebecca, which appears to be the script of the film we are watching. The words absent from the video are here written on the page in the second person, describing not what the character or actor should do, but what you should do.

The missing links between script and play, and the act of trying to fill in the blanks, is absorbing, making this little room by far the most rewarding place in the gallery.