A capsule collection

Reviewed: Perspective 2000, Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast until October 14th (048 90 321402)

Bamboo Support by Dan Shipsides, Carlton Cinema building, O'Connell St, Dublin until December 2nd (Information from IMMA on 016129900)

Meeting Morandi, Fenderesky Gallery, Belfast until October 13th (048 90 235245)

Vanitas-Vanitae by Javier de la Garza, Triskel Arts Centre, Cork until October 12th (021-272022)

Perspective 2000 at the Ormeau Baths Gallery is quite like a capsule version of a generic international art show, one you could encounter, in most of its essentials, in almost any major European or American city - or indeed, almost anywhere in the world.

In fact you could imagine the selector, Lynne Cooke, curator at New York's DIA Centre for the Arts, flying into any big city and coming up with something pretty close on the basis of an open submission.

A good sign, then, that art in the show's catchment area is up to speed with what's going on elsewhere, or an alarming confirmation of numbing consensus and conformity? Probably a bit of both, but within the terms of the act there is always some scope for enlivening aberration and that, in the end, is what gets you through the day, be you artist, curator, critic or disinterested observer.

For her Perspective Cooke has whittled down a gratifyingly large submission from 330 artists to a well-proportioned show by 29 of them, offering a very good range of work and a consistently engaging experience.

It is an open show and attracts work from the rest of Ireland as well as Britain, but there are some strong local accents, including John Duncan, whose documentary photographs of Belfast building sites are a useful record of a changing city. It's particularly interesting that the urban landscape and developers' signs (with such details as the names of the developers, the proposed developments and the aspirations they enshrine) mesh to provide complex historical portraits of the terrain.

There is also Phil Collins's disconcerting video account of Orange Order marchers on their way home, which captures the emergence of an otherwise repressed spirit of carnivalesque.

Some of the outstanding pieces include Paul Nugent's spectral paintings of nuns, surprisingly rich images in any number of ways, which steadily gain resonance as time goes by. Stephen Loughman's carefully stilted fragments of waxwork tableaux look good here, and Sabine Hagman and John Reardon's simple piece - a big stripe-patterned plastic hold-all apparently abandoned - has an added, distinctly sinister relevance given the location.

Kate Byrne (with very good, chilling, forensic-looking studies) and Dara McGrath (European border posts) show strong photographic work.

Jeroen Offerman's video The Great Escape is very funny, though a long wait. Melanie Jackson is more succinct with three punchy video pieces each thoughtfully and clearly designed. Stuart Gurden's mushroom-hunting photographs from Berlin are curiously compelling and thought-provoking in terms of how we look at, and organise images.

Some pieces are genuinely interesting although perhaps not quite there, including those by Justin Carter, Susan Morris and Beata Veszely. Certainly you'd like to see more from all three artists. Works by Nik Ramage and Darragh Hogan reflect the continued interest in kinetic sculpture.

Dan Shipsides's Handrail Route is a conceptual one-liner: the gallery's first-floor handrail continues impassively out over the void from the mezzanine floor (a reference, as well, to his prize-winning climb in a prior Perspective. He also has another, rather more elaborate one-liner showing in Dublin at the moment, his winning Nissan Art Project, Bamboo Support. This consists of the bamboo scaffolding which currently adorns the facade of the Carlton Cinema building in O'Connell St. Bamboo is widely used in this way in the Far East, and apart from the aesthetic qualities of the material, Shipsides intends a cautionary parallel between the erstwhile tiger economies of the Far East and the Celtic Tiger.

Shipsides is a good artist and, while the scaffolding looks tremendous in itself, and the comparison drawn is pertinent if not exactly profound, it must be said that for something that involved such heavy labour and logistics, Bamboo Support is in the end a fairly slim ideas piece - or "subtle," as IMMA Director and jury chair Declan MacGonagle put it with some understatement - entirely dependent on a gesture of transposition.

Comparisons may be odious but, looking at it, I couldn't help thinking of David Mach's remarkable classical newspaper columns, Built to Last, in Kilkenny during Arts Week, and wondering what, with his flair, attack and ingenuity, he might have come up with for Dublin given the project's £100,000 budget.

In curating a show around the theme of Meeting Morandi, Jamshid Mirfenderesky of the Fenderesky Gallery clearly touched an artistic nerve. The 13 artists he approached have all been inspired to produce work that is ambitious, committed and thoroughly engaged. By citing Morandi, not only one of the most celebrated painters of the 20th century but one who chose to work almost exclusively in still life, Mirfenderesky is prompting meditations on the current state of the genre, and he gets them.

Amelia Stein (deliberately?) breaks one of the cardinal rules of still life by photographing, in separate images, four pears and four onions (even numbers = symmetry = lack of compositional dynamism), but then throws in a study of three apples to restore disorder.

Willie Heron's Morandi's Table is a homage in the form of a terrific painted wood sculpture, which also recalls Tony Cragg. There are fine paintings by Nathalie Du Pasquier, who has an obvious and natural affinity with Morandi, Nick Miller, David Crone, Stephen McKenna and Paddy McCann, whose understated pieces are thoroughly contemporary and laced with layers of allusion. This is, in all, a beautiful show that deserves wider exposure.

Mark Ewart adds: Mexican artist Javier de la Garza exhibits a selection of large-scale colour photographs in this, his first solo show in Ireland. The main point of entry into his work would have to be his choice of imagery, consisting of toy figures arranged within various urban and interior settings.

The main protagonist is the ubiquitous Ken - Barbie's boyfriend. But any reference to our childhood fascination with being able to manipulate and control toy figures ends abruptly, as de la Garza has imposed a sullied sexual context on these ordinarily innocent characters.

To take the imagery seriously requires a leap of faith on the part of the viewer, so each figure can become an embodiment of a real person. Ken becomes the ideal man, athletic and potent; his companion is the antithesis - luridly coloured folds of flesh sag from his obese frame. What these and other figures get up to is not always clear, as the artist often blurs the focus of the camera to obscure details. Irritating for some perhaps, but the effect can have a certain intangible beauty.

Ultimately, de la Garza's work could be read as a social commentary upon a sub-culture within the sex industry, where liaisons are discrete, unequal and not particularly discerning. But more generally, the artist seems to be exploring notions of human vanity and self-image and how, in our perfectionist, consumer driven culture, strangers can shape lifestyles and attitudes as much as we ourselves.