The Dimplex warms up

DOROTHY Cross is the favourite to win the £15,000 IMMA/Glen Dimplex Award for the visual arts on Monday evening. The Cork born artist is famous for her artistic fixation with a certain cow part, but at IMMA she exhibits three works: the first is based around a kiss, the second, around snake skin, and the third is a photographic work based around a rugby match. There are two Northern contenders, Belfast born Paul Seawright, who exhibits his controversial photographic exhibition on the RUC, Police Force, and the Tyrone born Willie McKeown, who exhibits two new abstract paintings, which are responses to the nature of the rooms of the museum.

Maurice O'Connell, from Dublin, wellknown for having spent hours pent up in a room in the museum by way of performance art, will use his space as a laboratory for conversation, which will become the first of a series entitled sounds like silence (lower case is de rigeur these days). Dubliners Garrett Phelan and Mark McLoughlin are represented by their installation Time is, Time was, Time is past, the first part of which is based on a Morsecode transmission, of these words from Collins Barracks by a soldier of the 2nd Field Signal Company of the Irish Army last year. The exhibition continues until July 13th, but get up to IMMA over the weekend to decide on your own winner.