Festival takes a subtle approach

VISUAL ARTS / Aidan Dunne: Precaution, Irish Museum of Modern Art, until Oct 2 (01-6129900)The Moore Street Lending Library, 55 Moore Street (access via Samson's Lane) Tues-Sat 11.30am-7.30pm, until Oct 15

The Fringe Visual Arts have previously made a tentative foray or two into the Irish Museum of Modern Art, including the siting of a shipping container close to the main entrance to the building. This year the container is back, as part of a more substantial Fringe presence, titled Precaution. This lively project, curated by Janice Hough, Johanne Mullan and Marguerite O'Molloy, infiltrates works by eight young artists into the fabric of the institution. The term infiltrates is appropriate not because IMMA is viewed as enemy territory but because the pieces are, in general, subtle, oblique and quizzical.

True, Eilis McDonald, who occupies the container, proposes it as an alternative IMMA, but in a benign, almost gentle spirit. Her handmade postcards and badges parody the institutional marketing that is now endemic to museum culture, but one feels she lacks the cruelty of a true satirist. No harm, either. She very effectively leads us into the depths of the enclosure, heightening the sense of compression with a fearsome sound-and-light show incorporating a score by her own group, Tremors.

The decibel level notwithstanding, gentleness characterises this and much else of the work on view. Nina Canell's installations are kinetic and sonic sculptures composed of workaday, often discarded, materials, including, vitally, light fittings, speakers, amps, turntables and other electronic bits and pieces - all reconfigured into delicate, idiosyncratic arrangements that have a magical, lyrical buoyancy.

Brigitte Heffernan's whimsical drawings, in the form of comic style narratives, feature Heath Robinson-like devices designed to tackle trivial tasks and irritations.

They culminate in a functioning model, Toaster Long Jump, which is perhaps mocking of competitive athletics, and pits different kinds of bread and crackers against each other to see which can be ejected furthest from a toaster.

Eoin McHugh's drawings, which mimic various styles of illustration, usually with a didactic intent, evidence a fascination with odd devices and activities, all left pointedly unexplained. And he moves convincingly from two to three dimensions.

Caroline Donoghue, like McHugh and several other of the artists, featured strongly in this year's art school graduation shows. Nominally a printmaker, her conceptual resourcefulness and proficiency across a range of forms are impressive. In one beautiful sculptural piece, a forest springs from the huge open pages of an antique ledger from Belfast Gasworks, as though reclaiming the energy extracted from the long gone trees.

John Beattie symbolically "paints" the grounds of IMMA in his performance-video piece: an interesting idea that doesn't quite clinch its own argument. The same is true of Paul Coffey's paper punch piece. His speciality is devising witty exercises in futility, and his one little Christmas decoration, plugged into a huge heap of power extensions, is a neat example. Vanessa Donoso Lopez liberally populates several spaces with her diminutive clockwork doll figures, usually employing spools of coloured thread in ingenious ways. The catalogue note on her refers to her concern with human relationships, but here a preoccupation with time also emerges here.

The Moore Street Lending Library is an ambitious, multifaceted project, an artistic intervention that sets out to create a space of social interaction, where information is available and ideas can be exchanged. Initiated by Katherine Sankey and organised by Firestation Studios, it is situated in a room on the upper floors of No 55 Moore Street.

Sankey's motivation was to catch one of Dublin's iconic sites in a state of flux, poised on the brink of redevelopment.

The library includes readily accessible information on the redevelopment plan, and on the individual components that have, over time, made up the collective term street. Input by artists ranges from documentary research projects, such are Daniel Jewesbury's archive-in-the-making to Louisa Sloan's daily, 40-minute live transmissions of her practising rolling her Rs. Amanda Healy is organising local screenings of material relating to the street; Sarah Kenny's mini theatre tableaux draw parallels between the events of the 1916 Rising and the street's contemporary embattled occupants.

The Potlatch Foundation is attempting to establish a barter network in the area. Open-ended and exploratory, it is an intriguing project that will evolve between now and its October 15th finish.