Simon Faithfull

'It is the problem of escaping the force of gravity that so stimulates his imagination as to lead him to think up a whole series of ways of reaching the moon, each more ingenious than the last,' wrote Italo Calvino of Cyrano de Bergerac. That's Simon Faithfull's problem and spur too, though his 'Escape Vehicle' (1995-2005) works - all seven of which are convened for the first time here - have repeatedly courted failure. In the first, a video shows a muffed effort at blasting a chair into space, as the projectile it is attached to explodes on launching. In the sculptural third, a boiler suit is held upright (but grounded) by a set of silver helium balloons. The animated sixth diagrams a quixotic, obviously doomed attempt to put a Mk 2 Ford Escort into geostationary orbit.

Yet the video 'Escape Vehicle no. 6' sees a balloon loft an office chair giddily into the upper atmosphere and its successor sends an orange boiler suit up towards the heavens. Even these aren't unconditional successes though: the chair, Faithfull's symbol of earthbound workaday mundanity, breaks up in the subzero heights, while the boiler suit obviously hasn't got anyone in it. Even when the artist appears to be operating from a genuinely errant position, wherein plain optimism might reignite ambition, the project ends up unable to resist fetishising disappointment. Effectively tragicomic, but a long way from the scientific spirit that underpinned the moon landings (with whose 40th anniversary this show seems timed to coincide), this is art of its time, for sure.