Visual Arts: Pillars 1, a photographic, video and sculptural installation by Mary Kelly at the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Bella, a new photographic work by Abigail O'Brien at the Rubicon Gallery on St Stephen's Green and   Collaborators II, photomontages, by Douglas Ross at the Signal Arts Centre in Bray - reviewed by Aidan Dunne.

Pillars 1, photographic, video and sculptural installation by Mary Kelly. Mermaid Arts Centre.

Main St, Bray. Until May 26th. 01-2724302.

We are currently in the midst of a dramatic phase of development in Ireland's building and transport infrastructure, something that has, quite rightly, attracted a reasonable level of artistic attention.

Now, Mary Kelly's exhibition, Pillars 1 at the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, obliquely addresses some of the issues attendant on the construction industry and the property boom. Her show incorporates sculptural installation, photographs and video.

A series of circular pillars, simulated structural supports, are distributed regularly through the gallery space. Their concrete-like surfaces are composed of photographic montages, reproducing fragments of architectural drawings and graffiti culled from port-a-loos and other areas of building sites. In other words, Kelly is foregrounding what is usually in the background, if not hidden, making glaringly visible what is usually covert. The graffiti is, as it usually is, lewd and crude, coarsely sexual, often aggressive, as though the veneer of manners and decorum that usually prevails in society has been torn away.

Kelly describes it as an underlying language of a "potency and urgency which is synonymous with the internal building process itself". It's not at all clear that it is synonymous (and that "internal" is puzzling), but it is analogous, or at least she visualises it as being so in the form of the phallic pillars embellished with phallic symbols and sexual comments. When she refers to the "energy surge" of the building process, she seems to be equating it with the sexual energy frequently referred to in the graffiti imagery, and reinforced by some of the architectural details she includes, specifically those of decorative plant motifs resembling sexual organs.

She also describes graffiti as "a concrete manifestation of personal and communal ideologies". Or, you could say, the assertion of identity through the expression of prejudices. It could be that such graffiti, in what is still an intensely masculine environment, expresses an anxiety underlying competitive masculinity, and a frustration born of powerlessness and alienation. These repressed, unconscious feelings manifest themselves in the form of obscene graffiti. After all, the workers are making buildings for someone else, for corporations and developers. In the widest sense, workers, that is general labourers, tradespeople, contractors, architects, engineers and planners do not comprise one homogenous unit but a number of discrete groups whose overlapping interests do not necessarily coincide and are even, to varying degrees, antagonistic.

The architectural diagrams and graffiti are counterpointed by another main strand of imagery: the hoardings that border building sites and feature advertisements for the finished buildings in the form of lifestyle advertisements. These are, by contrast, socially opulent and idealised. Affluent and stylish people disport themselves decorously in lavish surroundings, living the dream. It's not enough to advertise bricks and mortar, you have to commodify the aspirational lifestyle, with its sense of exclusivity and social status, and imply that it too can be bought. This form of promotion is now so ubiquitous and established around Dublin that an element of what looks like conscious self-parody has crept into some examples.

The video segments of Pillars 1 are a protracted drive-by view of various high-profile developments and their promotional imagery, intercut with garish footage of a funfair. We're all being carried along on a property merry-go-round. But there's something underwhelming about both the means and the conclusion here, as if Kelly hasn't made enough of the material. By far the most successful part of the show is the array of pillars, which is relatively self-contained, ambiguous and provocative.

Bella, new photographic work by Abigail O'Brien. Rubicon Gallery, 10 St Stephen's Green.

Tues-Sat noon-6pm. Until May 26th. 01-6708055.

In the past, Kelly and Abigail O'Brien have worked collaboratively and the latter's latest solo show, Bella, is currently running at the Rubicon Gallery. It consists of a series of anthropomorphised photographic "portraits" of an elaborate confectionery dessert, evoking "the fragile beauty of a petticoated, fading belle", making up a contemporary take on the vanitas still life. The vanitas reminds us that flowering and beauty are shadowed by dissolution and death, that all is vanity.

O'Brien offers us a repetitious series of glossy, large-scale images, each differently styled - each keyed to a different, often garish colour, for example - but really with precious little variation. It is all slickly done, with a bling factor, so that you can see buyers at international art fairs, like children in a sweetshop, saying: "Yes, I'll have one of those." But as an entire exhibition the idea seems over-extended, and at times indistinguishable from the glossy images of desserts in Italian cafes.

Collaborators II, photomontages, by Douglas Ross. Signal Arts Centre, 1 Albert Ave, Bray.

Tues-Fri 10am-1pm, 2pm-5pm Sat-Sun noon-5pm. Until May 20th. 01-2762039.

There's more than a hint of sword and sorcery about Douglas Ross's exhibition at the Signal Arts Centre in Bray, Collaborators II.

Ross's photomontages (plus a couple of capable digressions into sculpture) are staged tableaux. The collaboration referred to in the title lies in his interaction with a number of individuals, including Maria Garcia Montanes, Nina Ayoub, Karen Ward, Dermot McCabe, Michael Cooney and more. Through conversation with each, an appropriate pictorial narrative emerged with reference to key experiences or dreams, often relayed through pre-existing myths or stories.

It is striking that these different people converge on a common visual language which is, presumably, more Ross's than their own. The result is a bit like an internet role-playing game in which individuals can project themselves into a realm of fantasy. Right from the beginning of video games, there has been an odd sympathy between high technology and gothic fantasy, and such is the case here, where computer manipulation allows for some inventive visual wizardry.

The work is well made, but it is firmly rooted in a New Age vernacular of personal symbolism, dreams, eclectic mysticism, self-realisation and fairies at the bottom of the garden. It's a specific imaginative world of its own, in other words. If you are not of that persuasion yourself, the results can look very like kitsch, but it has to be said that it seems to be entirely genuine, and occasionally pieces transcend their generic limitations.