THE Mercer Art Gallery is introducing a new format for its latest touring exhibition, a series of film and video works from the Arts Council Collection.

Now Showing features a different projection by a different artist for each of its six weeks.

The show, which is on a national tour, draws on diverse influences including home movies, news media, archive footage, television documentary and mainstream cinema. All works are new acquisitions and an accompanying text has been written by Francis McKee.

Now Showing opened on January 10, so Mark Lewis’s 2002 film, Children’s Games, Heygate Estate, has left town already. Luke Fowler’s What You See Is Where You’re At is what you can see until Sunday: a 2001 work by the 2008 winner of the first Jarman Film Award that takes advantage of the vast repositories of moving-image archives available to artists.

By assembling clips to build a portrait of the Scottish anti-psychiatrist and guru RD Laing, Fowler comments on the harrowing experiences of schizophrenics.

From Tuesday to February 1, the focus falls on Idris Khan, winner of the Photographers’ Gallery Prize in 2004.

Khan’s 2006 work, A Memory… After Bach’s Cello Suites, is a layered film about repetition and memory in which a cellist plays excerpts from Bach’s Six Suites for the Cello Solo.

Rosalind Nashashibi contributes Midwest from February 3 to 8. The content of her 2002 film is at once recognisable as the American urban backdrop seen on television or in movies, and much of the power of the images resides in the familiarity of the landscapes.

For his 2005 film, The Gates Of Damascus, Mark Boulos followed the events during Easter weekend when Syrian housewife Myrna Nazzour claimed to bear the stigmata wounds of Christ’s crucifixion. Her home was turned into a holy place.

In a work on show from February 10 to 15, Boulos mixes documentary film with the supernatural qualities of a horror movie to depict the frenzy of film crews and pilgrims clamouring for evidence.

The Otolith Group concludes the exhibition from February 17 to 22 with Otolith, a film from 2003. Founded in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun and Richard Couzins, the group draws on multiple archival sources, in this case splicing found or historical material with new footage from a visit to Star City in Russia to create an amalgam of fact and fiction.

* The Mercer Art Gallery, in Swan Road, Harrogate, is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm, and on Sundays, 2pm to 5pm, but is closed on Mondays except Bank Holidays. Admission is free.