Lucas Johnston was born in the 1940s in Hartford, Connecticut, where the aircraft factory was the main employer. Having worked in Nicaragua, he thus felt at home in industrial, provincial Belfast, where he spent the summer of '97 - Drumcree 3 - in residency in the Flax Art Studios on the city's uneasy Crumlin Road, past its Houses of Correction and Justice.
His responses to these tensions are contained in a series of dark, finely-executed, taut and ever so tight pen-and-ink drawings, where the Y-shaped stanchions erected by the security forces, bare of their accustomed razor wire, symbolise in their hill-top trinities a society crucified in overtones of religiosity.
Others, built up layer upon layer in a scheme as elegant and complete as prints, offer a border landscape of watch towers and watching eyes.
Implicit in the strength of the drawings is surely the contradictory surprise that all this exists so near and yet so far from the blue-collar normalities of shipyard and aircraft production and the pleasant fripperies of the bar and bistro lifestyle of the city's artists.
Until January 30th.