Inspired perhaps by the fact that their work will travel to six venues around Australia, several contributors to Return to Sender, the current group show of Irish artists, have explored what effects the journey might have in terms of the artist's authority and the business of meaning. Jeanette Doyle makes the best joke of the problem with While Away #1 & #2, two jigsaw puzzles cut from enlarged family snaps, showing unremarkable domestic moments made even more ephemeral by the jigsaw patterns that now wander through them. Once transported, the images will have to be, at least in theory, pieced together, decoded and puzzled over anew at every venue.
Paul O'Neill's Excess Bag- gage . . . seems to play a similar game. His collection of bric-a-brac, records, samples and mementos of all kinds comes complete with notes suggesting that the next assembler should add some of his/ her own photos. Disposable cameras are provided as evidence of the seriousness of the suggestion. Some artists, however, have chosen not to worry too much about the specifics of transportation and concentrate instead on offering samples of ongoing works. Finola Jones's collection of now familiar figurines softens an apparently serious attempt to create a compound icon of the 20th century through the careful deployment of kitsch.
Nigel Rolfe's contribution is a series of colour images of squeezeboxes, the intricate and subtle differences between the instruments revealing, perhaps, another secret language behind the music.
Until January 29th