An atmosphere of dreamy languor

Visual Arts: Reviewed: Jaki Irvine: Solo Screenings, Andrew Vickery: Do You Know What You Saw?, Cathy Wilkes and Brien Vahey.

Jaki Irvine: Solo Screenings, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, until February 14th

(01-6709093)

Andrew Vickery: Do You Know What You Saw? Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, until March 4th (01-6081116)

Cathy Wilkes, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, until March 4th (01-6081116)

Brien Vahey, Solomon Gallery, Dublin, until February 18th (01-6794237)

In 1999 Jaki Irvine staged an ambitious five-screen film installation, The Hottest Sun, The Darkest Hour, at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, in Dublin. The cavernous space echoed to the clackety-clack of projectors - which have a habit of breaking down - and flickered with the moving light reflected from the screens by the black and white images.

The work was made in Italy, where Irvine has spent a lot of time and, subtitled, with fragmentary, looped snippets of narrative, the whole thing was imbued with nostalgia for an earlier era of European art cinema.

Solo Screenings, Irvine's first Kerlin Gallery show, features three short film pieces projected sequentially and a work looped on a monitor over in one corner, a sort of perpetuum mobile in which the camera, fixed on a body of water, records the comings and goings of swimmers, canoeists and seagulls in a continuous procession.

Although it is in colour, Ivana's Answers again recalls the look, mood and textures of art cinema. And again, mood overshadows narrative. In terms of content, it is both ordinary and very strange. A woman reads the tea leaves of her companion. She mentions the non-arrival of a man on a train and sees a figure made up of falcons. We can indeed see such a figure in the leaves. Their conversation is intercut with scenes of an aviary, and the film begins with a shimmering night-time view of a train pulling into a station. We could infer that she is uncannily accurate in her reading of the leaves.

She is also, apparently, an entomologist. At any rate she is surrounded by masses of preserved beetles, which she studies through a magnifier, without arousing comment from her companion. There is a peculiar echo to the motif of studying: tea leaves, beetles, birds. Irvine likes to generate an atmosphere of dreamy languor, solipsistic reveries, to sustain moments in which odd fissures and disjunctures in the fabric of reality open up strange imaginative spaces, and she does so here.

Having said that, however, the other two works display something suspiciously like neat narrative closure. In Holding It All Together, a meditation on memory and loss, a person disappears from an old family photograph. In The Actress the camera lingers lovingly in close-up on a woman with soft, expressive eyes as she goes through a series of false starts, like out-takes from an audition. We hear her story in a voice-over. It builds to a cruel punchline that she delivers herself. There is, it is true, the feeling that something else is going on in this woman's engagement with the camera or, perhaps, its rapt engagement with her. Ambiguity, but a fruitful ambiguity.

Although Andrew Vickery's Do You Know What You Saw? was inspired by a 1984 trip to Bayreuth to a performance of Parsifal, Wagner doesn't provide the soundtrack. That consists of jaunty folk tunes as if performed by an amateur band at a local fair. It accompanies a series of paintings, photographed and projected onto a screen we observe through a model stage set.

The images, which look as if they were derived from photographs, have a nice lightness of touch and indeed chronicle the Bayreuth experience in an engagingly open, enthusiastic way, giving equal weight to the most mundane details and the opera itself, to high art and popular culture. The memory of the trip is framed by its object, the opera, but the experience takes on a life of its own, one that transcends the opera.

From the relative maximalism of the Douglas Hyde's Gallery 2 to the cryptic minimalism of its main Gallery 1. There Cathy Wilkes has distributed fabricated steel markers throughout the space, augmented by a group of small canvases on the walls, industrial sanding machines and a copy of Spare Rib magazine on the ground. There is an intentionally unfinished feeling to the installation, as though it is either a work in the making or an aftermath.

Spatially, the right-angled steel pieces create a nice rhythmic texture in the gallery. The images on the wall are faded and understated even when composed of expressive gestures. There are a number of pointers towards the idea of constructing something, perhaps femininity, but that could be entirely incidental given the oblique, digressive nature of the material.

It's hard to say how something might be right or wrong in this incredibly tentative, intuitive arrangement of diverse things, apparently at once fussily precise and utterly random - but somehow the videotape leaning against the wall behind a piece of glass adds a note of preciousness and pretension.

Brien Vahey's paintings at the Solomon Gallery are bright, vigorous responses to a number of subjects, mostly the domestic ones of gardens and beach holidays. There are also straightforward landscapes, of the Wicklow Mountains and the Ballymoney shoreline, which are among the best things in the show. In them, including his expansive view of Glencree Valley, his style of relaxed representational reportage delivers a winning combination of description and atmospheric immediacy.

It also looks as if he is stretching himself in these works, and in some of the garden pieces, including September Garden. Not everything in the show is as convincing, though. A significant proportion of the paintings are a bit too loose, even for their upbeat, light nature, and he is very unsure of how to deal with figures. Still, the best work is evidence of his real abilities and potential, and it's a very promising first solo show.