Setting the scene in empty rooms

VISUAL ARTS:FIONA HACKETT, who has shown a number of neatly conceptualised, impeccably made photographic projects in various group exhibitions, has her first solo show at the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray. It features one project, with a strong Bray component.

The photographs, some with accompanying texts, that make up Fade Outwere inspired by the history of the Bray Head Inn. Hackett has lighted on the fact that the Inn exists in a peculiar, in-between state. On the one hand it is a real, functioning hotel; on the other it's a frequently reinvented backdrop for film productions based in the nearby Ardmore Film Studios.

Without being at all heavy-handed, the artist explores the ambiguous nature of the inn’s interiors, its public lounges and its bedrooms. Underlying her images is the idea that a hotel is, in any case, a piece of artifice, an invented setting with a certain level of theatricality. The Bray Head Inn is not, it should be emphasised, a glitzy designer hotel. From the evidence of the photographs it’s a plain, utilitarian place that harks back to a pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Her images refers to several films which used the inn as a setting, including Disco Pigs, The Commitmentsand Amongst Women. If you drop in to the Mermaid on the off-chance of seeing movie stars at work, however, you will certainly be disappointed. Hackett presents us with deserted rooms, mostly in a half-light as dispiriting as only a pub sans atmosphere and vitality can be. Next to each view she prints extracts of dialogue from the films, accentuating the sense of spaces that have been vacated and are caught during an interregnum, awaiting the resumption of activity. This holds true as well for the views of bedrooms, which have an even bleaker, more desolate air about them.

Printed larger than the other images, one composition features an interior which is being used as a set. It's a world within a world. While there are lots of signs of production activity, it too is photographed when no one's around. In referring to social, functional settings while at the same time steering clear of people, Hackett is following a well-tried pictorial strategy. Absence can be more arresting than presence: put people in the picture and they become the story, take them away and we are prompted to look at the role and nature of the spaces and the potential stories they frame. Among the subjects taken on by the artist in the past are views of embassy interiors and the cultural penchant for lavishing huge resources on making lawns in glaringly unsuitable environments. She is amassing a formidable body of pointed, intelligent and consistently intriguing work, and Fade Outis a worthy addition to it.

THE INVENTION OF MORELwas originally published in 1940 by the Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. It's a short novel, a work of "reasoned imagination", as Jorge Luis Borges put it when he described it as being nothing less than "a perfect novel". Certainly it's been quietly influential in all sorts of ways, and it is the inspiration for Martin Healy's latest exhibition, Facsimile, at the Rubicon Gallery, a video installation that excerpts a voice-over narration from the book.

Casares's story, which is set on a remote tropical island, conjectures a projection of reality that competes with the real thing. Its narrator tries to enter the projection having fallen in love with a woman who resides permanently within it. Alan Resnais's cult film Last Year at Marienbadwas inspired by the book which was, in turn, influenced by HG Wells science fiction story The Island of Doctor Moreau. Both Wells and Casares surely helped shape the convoluted fantasy of the television series Lost, and the notion of a protagonist entering into a realm of looped, repetitious time forms the basis of the 1993 comedy film Groundhog Day. There's much more, certainly enough to indicate that Morel occupies a central position in a tangle of creative influences and overlaps.

Healy’s work has long reflected an interest in the uncanny and the inexplicable or, more accurately perhaps, in our need for the inexplicable. Rather than setting out to debunk urban myths, or simply buying into them, Healy adopts a distanced, objective but not unsympathetic approach that allows us to see the appeal of the irrational, and to see how it flourishes in context: his feeling for atmosphere is a primary strength.

Taking on the formidable artistic pedigree of Morel, he opts for a formally spare approach. A series of tracking shots brings us closely into the midst of tropical vegetation. A moving camera is often hypnotic in that it seems to be leading us somewhere. The voice-over describes the island, caught in its temporal repeat-pattern.

Though we encounter birds of paradise and other exotic plants, we never progress to encounter something beyond the foliage until, eventually, we glimpse a containing framework. Although we’ve heard birdcalls, the utter stillness of the scenes, unmoved by even the breath of a breeze, is unsettling.

What Healy has done is not to illustrate but to mirror Casares’s idea. Instead of an island of time in a lush natural setting, endlessly rehearsed, he offers us an island of lush natural forms, preserved in the contrived space of a glasshouse. In fact it’s a glasshouse in the National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin. It is an absorbing and fruitfully perplexing piece of work that leaves us asking questions, and it draws inventively on its literary source.

LAURA MCMORROW'S All cats are grey in the darkat the Bookcube Gallery is a very good exhibition. McMorrow is a recent graduate from the Limerick School of Art and Design. She embraces an informal, low-tech aesthetic, using a variety of found and discarded objects and materials to compose a loose autobiographical saga.

Rather than merely navel-gazing as that might sound, however, she is interested in such issues as orientation, perception, place and belonging, and her works evidence a beautifully poetic, meditative sensibility –  she also has a good sense of humour and employs it to great effect.

Fade Outby Fiona Hackett, Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray Until Mar 7

Facsimile,new work by Martin Healy, Rubicon Gallery, St Stephen's Green Until Mar 28

All cats are grey in the dark, mixed media works by Laura McMorrow, Bookcube Gallery, 1st Floor, 203 Lr Rathmines Rd Until Mar 6