Reviewed:

Outart 2000: Things We Do, Arthouse until July 23rd Kevin Kavanagh Gallery until July 29th Land Marks, Robert Clark, Hallward Gallery until July 7th Here and Africa, Nancy Wynne-Jones, Taylor Gallery The Print Room, Ruth Johnstone, Temple Bar Atrium Gallery

Outart, at Arthouse, has established itself as a noteworthy annual fixture. This year's show, subtitled Things We Do, is, says the press release, "an investigation of daily life exploring the shifting challenges, choices and contradictions of queer culture". But the show's selector, Patrick T. Murphy (who edited it down to just nine artists from an undisclosed submission) notes immediately in his introduction that "we have attempted to identify artists in the submission that place issues of art before issues of sexual identity or politics." He argues that "queer art" can no longer afford to define itself solely on the basis of its subcultural status, which is another way of stating Edmund White's observation that it's not enough just to proclaim your gayness.

Things We Do is concerned with the everyday. What queer art practitioners bring to this is an innate interest in questioning normative categories, something eloquently exemplified in Kaye Shumack's photographic sequence, which obliquely chronicles three typical domestic rituals, and subtly raises the question of how identity is articulated or maintained within such defining patterns.

Garret Barry travesties genteel romantic conventions with a series of parodic title pages, looking a bit the worse for wear and spattered with bodily fluid type stains, that suggest the pungent, unpredictable, even brutal physicality of love and desire.

There is a brutal quality to Phil Collins's photographs as well. Under the collective title you're not the man you never were, they evoke a sense of damage and painful vulnerability, but also a tentative but stubborn resilience and recuperation.

There is an air of desperation to Nuno Alexander Ferreira's series of self-portrait photographs in which he frantically reinvents himself, underwritten by the implication that there is no single authentic, real image. Andrew Fox's caricaturish pastels of a series of beefy blokes, conversely, seem to argue for a certain latitude in our tendency to stereotype.

Nairn Scott's flashing neon sign, which reads simply Average, highlights the mythical middle ground inhabited by no-one.

Kevin Kavanagh's idea in his group show, Vivid, is to marshal work that displays in some way a "vividness of representation", a phrase he plucked from an essay on William Scott by Simon Morley. His selection encompasses the hard, even strident realism of Shirley Goodwood's painting, Timorous Creature, depicting a child wearing a mouse mask, and Michael Boran's opposite line of approach in his photographs, which direct our attention to figurative subjects by framing their absence.

So vividness translates into a strategy that focuses our perceptions. Margaret Corcoran does it through startling reworking of art-historical models. Mark O'Kelly elevates a banal photographic reproduction to the status of a full-scale painting, incorporating, a la Luc Tuymans, a strip of border. The best piece in the show is probably an excellent photographic triptych by Monica Gutierrez.

There is colour in Land Marks, Robert Clark's Hallward Gallery exhibition, but the show could justifiably bear the label: No paint was used in the making of these works. They are textural paintings, built up from layers of cement grout and sand mixed with shellac. The chemical interactions of the various elements produce subtle infusions of yellow earths, greens, blues and even purples. But, by and large, texture rules the roost. Clark not only creates blocky masses but also scrapes through the layers. The format usually suggests landscape, and the stated inspiration is his native Donegal.

So far so good, you think. Yet, while the work is attractive, technically adept and reasonably evocative, it is also very tame, as though he is trying to harness his unorthodox methods to create relatively conventional landscapes, rather than stretching convention by more vigorously exploiting his materials. It is fine on its own terms, but should transcend them. That's the problem with venturing into the same general area as a world-class artist like Antonio Tapies.

Nancy Wynne-Jones, whose show Here and Africa, has just ended at the Taylor, is an audacious painter who constantly refines and distils, working the surface over and over in bold, vigorous swathes. But she is also true to the gesture: "if it's right, let it stand" seems to be her motto, and the more raw and direct it is, the better.

The refinement is in getting just the colour, just the atmosphere she wants, not in housekeeping, in tidying things up. So the mark has a central, residual presence in her work. A picture like The Little Mosque, in recreating an image and an experience in terms of a few broad areas of colour, parallels Howard Hodgkin without in any way resembling his paintings.