Visual Arts: Garrett Phelan's Racer Recaptured takes the viewer on a journey in more ways than one, writes Aidan Dunne.

Reviewed:

Garrett Phelan: Racer Recaptured, SS Michael & John, Dublin, until December 19th (087-6700087)

Joy Gerrard: The Crowd Transfixed, Temple Bar Studios, Dublin, until December 20th (01-6710073)

Vivienne Roche & Amelia Stein: On Waves And Water, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, until December 20th (01-6708055)

Garrett Phelan's Racer Recaptured takes the viewer on a journey in more ways than one. For a start, it follows a trend in opting out of a conventional gallery setting. To visit the exhibition, you phone the artist and arrange to meet. He brings you to SS Michael & John, formerly Dublin's Viking Adventure, and you make your way down to a large room devoid of natural light. The installation is a room within a room, entered via two doors with a short corridor between.

This space is essentially a set, a mock-up of a recording studio, in which the equipment is drawn onto the walls, with the exception of the speakers, which are real and relay a muted, rhythmic humming punctuated by the sound of seabirds and other ambient detail. We can look through a glazed door into an inner space containing a monitor that plays a video entitled Racer.

From this set-up it is reasonable to conclude that we are looking at the recaptured Racer - and that the piece is on one level about the use of technology to capture and preserve fugitive moments and on another about the impossibility of doing so: the real thing has spiralled away, leaving us with this ghostly studio and a memory, something at one remove. All of which gives an otherwise cool, laid-back set-up an odd poignance.

Which brings us to Racer. For its 13 or so minutes we look at a spinning image. We can make out what it is: the Martello tower on Donabate strand, in north Co Dublin, a formidable structure designed as a vantage point to provide warning of imminent invasion. As the camera spins the image becomes a spiral pattern, drawing our eyes in hypnotically. But the camera is not only spinning: its position in relation to the tower keeps shifting, so the spiral mutates continually.

It is visually very striking. In the video this structure, designed with looking in mind, comes to resemble an eye. It also suggests infinite recession. We can never catch up with what is seen - in Phelan's terminology, the racer has already bolted - and our attempts to capture and preserve it are in vain. A conventional image won't suffice: it fixes what is by nature mutable and ephemeral. Yet the work implies that we are, however uneasily or uncomfortably, compelled to try to redeem the past. It is a highly technological piece that is sceptical about the scope of technology in relation to the crucial aspects of life.

In The Crowd Transfixed, Joy Gerrard explores ideas relating to crowds and cities. She does so with abstract architectonic models, using some of the devices and materials of architectural model-makers. She then makes photographs from her invented worlds. Some are gorgeously presented, apparently encased in thick blocks of perspex. In general her photographic images have the look of the real without trying to pass themselves off as real. We know they are invented, with pins standing in for humans, for example, but they can still confuse us momentarily.

There is a cool beauty to the work, an air of detachment that is progressively undermined the more you look. What at first glance come across as affirmative visualisations of a utopian metropolis begin to seem ominous and totalitarian. The overwhelming scale and diminution of the human subjects could well be taken as indicative of a blank conformity. Yet Gerrard is ambivalent. She is surely drawn to the elegance, the clean, uncluttered design, of her abstracted world.

Of Waves And Water is not a collaborative venture but reflects a coincidence of interests on the part of two artists, the sculptor Vivienne Roche and the photographer Amelia Stein. Roche made a remarkable commissioned wall piece, Flow, completed last year, for the council chamber of Fingal County Hall. It is based on the patterns of tidal flow in the sand of the beach at Garrettstown, in Co Cork, where she lives.

It was by no means the first time the beach had proved a rich source of ideas and imagery for her, but the experience of the Fingal project feeds into the work in this show. While more modest in scale, it ingeniously evokes the same phenomenon in terms of the same materials, again using cast glass and plaster. The work takes the form of wall reliefs, each recreating pervasive patterns of flow, caught momentarily in the run of water in the cast glass and as imprinted onto sand in the plaster. They are elegant, contemplative works with a pervasive calm.

Stein's fine black-and-white photographs, again based on the tidal patterns etched into sand by water and seaweed, do not aim for the same feeling of calmness. Caught in sharp relief by the evening sun, the fine-grained surfaces are cut by dense linear stalks, evocative not only of plant forms but also of nerves, probing and sentient, stretching out into space. With their delicate, vulnerable forms, they are surely about transience, uncertainty and time. Indeed, the notion of temporality runs through the show as a whole.