Playing tricks with time

Institutional architecture has become something of a fetish in contemporary art photography: a retro-chic rehabilitation of Eastern European architecture, 1970s furniture and ghastly wallpaper that supposedly expresses our oppressed relationship with bureaucracy, modernism and the machinations of power. But it's a look that's sits all too easily in style magazines, and rarely elevates itself beyond chic documentary.

On paper, Catherine Yass's photographs fit this formula - she photographs grotty hospital corridors, high-tech Japanese sleeping capsules, and Czech metro stations - but there's a twist in her technique that saves the work from style trivia. Yass sandwiches together the negative of the slide together with its positive in order to release dense areas of violet-blue where the white light should fall. This trademark blue seeps through into the work like electrical static or psychic energy, brooding and hyper-real.

The trick works best on places rather than people: the irides-cent blue is perfect for charging the cold facade of architecture, but looks overwrought on human flesh. She manipulates video much better as a medium for portraiture: there are two pieces here, made for the opening of Walsall's New Art Gallery, and they are gems. Yass has concentrated on close-ups of a teenage boy and an older, tattooed man, and slowed down a few seconds of action by eight times.

Unlike the work of Douglas Gordon (who employs this technique to death with old films), Yass's video is compulsive, condensed viewing. The boy, in particular, is fascinating to watch: his fleeting glance to the left is effortlessly graceful and alert. The seamless loop has the sense of drawn-out time reminiscent of the long exposures in Victorian photography - such as Julia Margaret Cameron's portraits.

Although Yass is of the YBA generation, she eschews clever tricks and crotch-grabbing content (and thereby the patronage of Charles Saatchi) in favour of quiet, thought-out studies such as this. Her work fuses the free coloration and drawn-out atemporality of painting with the crystal sharp split-second immediacy of photography. Stunning shows like this mark her out as a mature and increasingly solid force in British art.

Until 25 February at the Jerwood Gallery. Tel: 020 7654 0173.