Strangeness in the straightforward

Reviewed:

Kate Belton, Recent Photographs, Rubicon Gallery until September 23rd (01-6708055); Survey, Mary McIntyre, Gallery of Photography until September 23rd, (01-6714654); John Minihan, Mirror with a Memory, National Photographic Archive (016030200); Nigel Rolfe, Temple Bar Gallery until September 22nd (01-6710073); Airplane II, Michael Durand Temple Bar Atrium until September 22nd (01-6710073); Sarah Spackman, Solomon Gallery until September 20th (01-6794237); Under Canopus, Leonard Sheil, Paul Kane Gallery, until September 23rd(016703141);

A lone hiker is picked out against a vast mountain landscape; a trawler is dwarfed by the sea; a fallen songbird lies on the ground; butterflies dance against a bright sky. The subjects of Kate Belton's photographs, at the Rubicon, are straightforward enough. The images, however, are something else, something altogether stranger. Still a young artist, the Welshborn Belton established her reputation by recreating ordinary spaces, notably an artist's studio, in the form of rough-hewn miniature models, and photographing them. The results are playful but oddly compelling images, with just a hint of menace or anxiety in the atmosphere.

In tackling the expansive open spaces of unrestricted nature, her new work is a more complicated, more hybridised mix of real and artificial. It's interesting that she started out as a painter, because arguably painting has more to do with the way her images are constructed - often literally constructed - than photography. Here, in ways that are sometimes difficult to disentangle, she combines constructions, collage and projected photographic imagery to produce images oddly rich in terms of pictorial texture and ripe with implied narratives. That is, sometimes we anticipate calamity, sometimes things seem just a little unsettling, but always there is sense of something going on. The net result is a distinctive, persuasive kind of fictional space, with all the imaginative possibilities that the term implies.

In Survey at the Gallery of Photography, Mary McIntyre also gets out into the wide open spaces, beyond of the confines of her usual institutional interiors, albeit for just a couple of images. These are her Construction of Utopia pieces, documentary studies of a motorway bridge under construction. The flyover itself, and the paraphernalia of its construction, are imposed on a verdant, perfectly ordinary rural landscape, in a matter-of-fact though, we are forced to acknowledge, slightly surreal way. Just as you can observe, on a journey that takes any of the main routes out of Dublin, incongruous suburban housing estates unrolling like carpets on rural landscapes.

Figures are always absent from, but implied in McIntyre's studies of interiors: spaces that have just been vacated or that are arranged for use. Perhaps the implication is that the structures we make, both the physical constructions themselves and the political and social structures that they stand in for in the work, fail in their utopian - or even just their controlling - aims. The abiding idea they suggest is of shabby, improvisational, fudge, a power that always resides elsewhere.

Photographer John Minihan's retrospective, A Mirror with a Memory, at the National Photographic Archive, is exceptionally good. With a long and distinguished career behind him, Minihan is well known as both a press photographer and as someone who has invested his energies in extraordinary personal projects, notably his obsessive documentation of life and death in the town where he grew up, Athy, and his sizeable body of work devoted to Beckett. He is a seasoned professional but he is also a natural snapper with a sure eye for classical pictorial compositions in black and white. There is always such a casual, unfussy air to his images that they look deceptively easy. Arguably his greatest strength, though, is that he is such an empathetic photographer of people of all ages and backgrounds, with the uncanny knack of entering whole-heartedly into their mental worlds. He clearly likes photographing celebrities such as Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett, and he does it very well, snatching good informal images, but his sympathetic yet hard-edged, unsentimental images of a disappearing world in his home town, Athy, including the wake of Katy Tyrrell and extremely fine portraits, will probably stand as his finest achievement.

Nigel Rolfe's Joy at the Temple Bar Gallery sounds better in outline than it comes across in actuality. He describes its genesis as a kind of documentary, almost anthropological project, during which he charted the habitual sites of joy-riding exploits, wrecks - and fatalities. He views the arcane rituals that have evolved around joy-riding, and he presents them as constituting on some level a critique of the "culture of dispossession" underlying the myths of the Celtic tiger.

So far, so good. But the work as presented doesn't quite deliver on these claims. It is in fact something more oblique and quizzical. Jumpy, "shakycam" footage of a wrecked car in a nicely incongruous, lushly vegetated rural setting is accompanied by a custom-made dance music soundtrack and images, in various forms and formats, of burnt-out cars and bouquets of flowers. The emphasis is on the distanced contemplation of ritual and remembrance, while the music affirms the surely un-mysterious lure of recklessness, speed and competitive aggression for young males. But all of this doesn't quite coalesce into a work that leaves a durable, coherent impression.

In the jokingly titled Airplane II, Michael Durand juxtaposes photographs of airline cabin crew, taken just after flight, with video images of jets flying high above - projected onto a surface suspended in the atrium void in Temple Bar. The installation was developed specifically for the space and it is reasonably effective (over the last year and more artists have done very well by this difficult space).

However, while the photographic part of the work recalls Rineke Dijkstra portraits of matadors taken immediately after bullfights, and are striking, oddly compelling images, there aren't really enough of them and, as it happens, they gain little from being hung in the casual atrium setting. It would be nice to see more of them in a different context.

Sarah Spackman, at the Solomon Gallery, is a popular artist who applies herself assiduously to three traditional subjects, still life, landscape and the nude. There is nothing particularly novel or startling about what she does, but it is honestly and unpretentiously done.

Her current work sees her somewhere between the emphasis on saturated colour and pattern typical of Matisse - something new for her - and Cezanne's more physical blocks of colour and form. Purple Tulips and Still Life with Blue Coffee Pot are very good Matisse-like compositions. Though the oils and mixed media on paper works in Leonard Sheil's Under Canopus at the Paul Kane Gallery are all concerned, quite specifically, with voyages to islands, from the Spice Islands to the Orkneys, he usually avoids straight representation. Instead he builds up layered, fluid masses of colour and texture which evoke schematic and real spaces - in fact the subjective experience of navigating against the huge, overwhelming presence of the ocean and the sky.