Reviewed:

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Architectural Series, Kerlin Gallery until June 3rd

Ann Mulrooney, recent sculpture, Peppercanister Gallery until May 25th

Jonathan Hunter, recent paintings, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until May 27th

Kristina Huxley and Natasha Kidd, One Mile's Time, Temple Bar Gallery until May 26th

Angie Grimes and Marja van Kampen, new works, The Bridge Gallery, until May 29th

Hiroshi Sugimoto's black and white photographs of modern architectural icons (and not-quite-icons) are perplexing for one blatant reason: they are practically all blurred, as though he never quite managed to get the damned things in focus. Since Hiroshi has long since proved that he is capable of making photographs of pin-point sharpness, we can only presume that he did it on purpose.

He is not the first artist to exploit the camera's capacity to blur reality. German painter Gerhard Richter has also used fuzzy images, in works that trade on photography's paradoxical reputation for both fidelity and distortion, but Hiroshi's work is not self-referentially about photography.

I have to say that the first time I encountered some of the architectural photographs I was pretty underwhelmed but, gathered en masse in the Kerlin, they look much more interesting second time around. They are still perplexing, but they are certainly worth seeing. The impression they make varies depending on your distance from them. As you approach they produce a peculiar effect, in that they seem about to come into focus but then, of course do not. Yet despite their blurredness, the buildings in them have a surprising solidity and, in the case of actual icons such as the New York Guggenheim, are completely identifiable.

What does happen quite dramatically is that Hiroshi's concern with light and time becomes apparent. Light has a dense, tangible presence, most obviously in his views of the alter in Le Corbusier's Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, and in the central part of the Shindler-Chase House. The latter is an extraordinary abstract light composition. Strangely enough, the photographs are at their best when glimpsed in passing, or at the periphery of your vision, as images you have not quite focused on.

Meshes of bare winter branches, silhouetted against the sky in big photographic prints, make up a kind of visual basso continuo in Ann Mulrooney's beautifully judged show at the Peppercanister. This insistent motif, repeated with minor variations, provides a guiding metaphor for her three-dimensional work, which refers in various ways to the notion of the interconnectedness of living things, a web of life. The bronze sculptures combine elements of plants, animals (including human) and artefacts in ways that also suggest a flowing continuity. Form and function reflect an underlying unity. Breast and vessel, root and nerve, limb and branch become dual, interrelated aspects of an all-encompassing pattern.

The best, most elegant pieces, including Channel, Cup and Filters, win out over larger, more schematic works like Clear Vision, but these too, it must be said, are managed very well. Mulrooney is restrained, never over-elaborates and most of all has a terrific sense of form and the technical skills to make the most of it. Born in Kilkenny, where she is now based, she studied at the Crawford in Cork and trained as a bronze chaser and metalworker in England. She deserves wide recognition.

There is a wistful, idyllic quality to Jonathan Hunter's pictures at the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery. They describe a mellow, pastoral realm, in which a male and a female figure linger. They are dreamy and relaxed. Yet they are patchwork figures in a patchwork world. The paintings continually draw our attention to the nuts and bolts of their making, with a certain disjointed quality and a deliberately sketchy, uneven finish. Details obtrude. Many of the hands, for example, seem disproportionately large and awkward. The bodies, like the landscape they inhabit, are not quite coherent. So there is the idea of an imagined peace, an enchanted place, sustained by force of will. All of this works most effectively on a small scale. Writ larger, the necessary dreamlike intensity is dissipated.

Though English by birth, Hunter studied at Dundee and has lived since in Glasgow and Spain. Spain clearly provides the landscape in his work, which particularly recalls Picasso's idyllic summers in the early years of the 20th century, and Scotland has provided the example of Glasgow painters Steven Campbell and Adrian Wiszniewski.

One Mile's Time, a minimal installation at Temple Bar Gallery, features just two, automated artworks, Natasha Kidd's Painting Machine and Kristina Huxley's Sensitive Painting. The former, which featured in last year's Young Contemporaries show in Liverpool, is a device that regularly lowers and raises a canvas into a perspex container filled with white paint. It is an effective one-liner but, beyond that, surely a recipe for monotony. Actually it is curiously engaging to watch the steady rise and fall, the paint running off the canvas. And there is a subtle, surprising progression involved: the gradually decreasing level of the paint produces a pattern of horizontal stripes across the canvas, a la Agnes Martin.

The heat-sensitive canvases are ingenious, ever-changing monochromes in which surface tone responds to shifts in temperature. The only drawback is the hotplate pattern of the heaters mounted behind the canvas, but the effect is still striking if uninvolving - but then that is, in a way, precisely the point of both works.

At the Bridge Gallery, Marja van Kampen's illustrative pictures are agreeably busy arrangements of line, colour and pattern, put together in a brisk, businesslike manner. They are at heart decorative, and unashamedly so, without being at all sweet.

Angie Grimes shows paintings and prints of plants. The prints evidence a greater concern for botanical accuracy, and are very good, while the paintings are moodier, more subjective pieces. They are also tentative compared to the prints, pulled between the demands of description and an evident desire to make less representational, close-toned compositions.