West coast to west coast

In a way, the entire nature of US artist Ed Ruscha's work is explicable in terms of one change of address. He was born in 1937 and, after he'd finished high school in 1956 he moved from Oklahoma - still "horse and buggy" country, then, as he recalls it - to Los Angeles. He embraced the paradoxical qualities of the city, "it's ugly and it's beautiful", and the mixture has consistently fascinated him since. The perceptual shift implied by this move allowed him to see the United States in a different way, a way that is perhaps best exemplified in the phenomenon of Pop Art.

Yet, though he became quite well known - particularly for his iconic images of gas stations - and built a formidable reputation, Ruscha didn't gain quite the enduring fame of an Andy Warhol and remains a peripheral presence in the art history books of the time. One reason is that he became, and still is, a Californian artist, and the east-west divide, while in some respects nebulous, is in others all too real.

However, Ruscha has gradually come to occupy a significant position among his peers and for a younger generation of artists, rather gratifyingly for him, no doubt, his reputation has never been higher.

The exhibition of his graphic art at the NUI Galway Gallery, curated by Jack Rutberg, draws on what is clearly a major private collection of his work. Like his contemporary, Robert Indiana, Ruscha's basic currency is the word as image.

To begin with, this was simply a reflection of his surroundings, of a sign-saturated environment, and it situates Indiana in a distinct American lineage of urban art extending back well beyond Pop and including such figures as Edward Hopper and Stuart Davis. Ruscha's increasingly gnomic plays on word as image, and word plus image, have a striking, deadpan surrealism about them, but also something of the edgy darkness that emerges in Bruce Nauman's much more aggressive verbal games. This compact show provides a terrific opportunity to get a sense of his output to date.

FOLLOWING last year's exhibition of designers' and sculptors' chairs, and again curated by Hilary Morley and Sean McCrum, Containers, at the Aula Maxima in NUI Galway, offered its participants a freer brief. Last year's show was particularly significant in that it led directly to the establishment of the Contemporary Furniture Designers' Co-Operative. This year sees the involvement of a number of composers, another interesting development.

The point about the show is that it provides designers with a context beyond the immediate, commercial one in which to question or extend the range of their practice - or not. It looks as though Roger Bennett's turned-wood bowls are pretty much what he does anyway, for example, but they are stunning, beautifully made sculptural objects. The other wood-turner, John Kemp, also fares well, with rugged-looking, ebonised poplar vases and a smaller, more sculptural piece. There are other aesthetic highlights, including Tom Kelly's elegant music stand (he cites Japan and Eileen Grey as influences) and Benny Treacy's wood and glass dish.

Roswell Stanley's cabinet and Jeremy Suffern's tower of drawers may lean towards convention but they are outstanding pieces nonetheless. Brian Murray develops the idea of a cabinet but gives it a symbolic quality by suggesting that it might serve as a kind of personal reliquary, and Andrew Martin's "tree trunk" container is a good, bold statement.

Beds are containers, and there are two in the show: Thomas Raven's ingenious and very striking baby's cot and Nuala Irwin's handsome, Japanese-influenced double bed. Containers is a thoroughly pleasant show simmering with creative energy and it augers well for the Co-Operative's future.

THE multi-talented, Germanborn Joe Boske has long been associated with the Galway Arts Festival, and his exhibition Amara, at the West End Gallery (a new venue on Upper Dominick Street, opposite Taylor's Bar) sees him in top form. In his intricately detailed, superbly crafted images, Boske creates a compelling, coherent dreamworld that is quite his own, though in terms of orientation it lies somewhere between the startling surrealism of Hieronymous Bosch and the visual conundrums of Maurits Escher.

Various forms of one powerful, brooding image dominate this show: a bird's head contained in an egg, perched atop a dolmenlike pillar against a Western landscape and the ever-present Atlantic.

Incidentally, the catalogue for his exhibition includes one of the funniest pieces of prose, by the estimable Tom Mathews, that you are ever likely to read - a very welcome antidote to the usual solemnity of cataloguespeak.

Mathews himself turns up in another festival show, the densely packed compendium of Literary Cartoons and Comic Strip Art, at Kennys Gallery, where the highlights include Mike McCarthy's Daniel O'Donal, comic strip based on a certain Donegal singer, Hunt Emerson's unexpurgated Lady Chatterly's Lover, and Terry Willers's bizarre Leprechauns. There are also standalone pieces from some of the best cartoonists and caricaturists around, from Billy Drake to Arja Kajermo.

Making up a show within a show, Stephen Dee's Time Pieces features his extraordinary miniature figures, three-dimensional caricatures executed with almost frightening precision. His 100 Year Old Man is a composite, chronological portrait of one notional everyman throughout the 20th century, while a series of individual figures picture quintessential Irish individuals from the same time-span, including Martin "The General" Cahill, and Matt Talbot, Peig Sayers, Charles Haughey and Gay Byrne.

THE German-born artist Hans Hemmert, whose work has previously been seen in Green on Red in Dublin, evidently has a thing about the colour yellow and about creating womb-like internal environments and retreating into them. For his thoroughly engaging video Hans Hemmert and Linda and the Funky Boys shame on you at the West End Gallery, ensconced in what looks like a giant yellow latex egg, he bounces happily around to the song of the same name.

MICK Mulcahy's Cosmic Dance, at the Galway Arts Centre, is not quite in step. Perhaps more than any other painter working in Ireland today, Mulcahy is a physical, gestural artist, and his body is tied directly to his work. He is also, at this stage, an adept picture-maker, supremely capable of handling large-scale surfaces, but there is a sense, in much of the work in Cosmic Dance, that he is on auto-pilot, relying on those sure abilities rather than fired with real passion or energy.

This is particularly evident, funnily enough, in the smaller pieces. The lustrous surfaces of the large works, designed in panels of alternating colours, have, at least initially, quite a convincing sense of presence, but this more or less evaporates in the smaller pieces.

All festival exhibitions continue until July 30th