COMPARED to last year's Kerlin Gallery exhibition of younger artists, this year's version of the show involves work of a far more uneven, less polished kind. An apparent move away from formally accomplished displays is interesting on some levels - the preciousness that the Kerlin space sometimes gives work is entirely absent - but it lends this crowded gathering the unkempt appearance of a college graduation show.
A principal offender in this respect is Daphne Wright, whose Lot's Wife II, an unsteady forest of concrete, wire and tinfoil, takes up a huge - and hugely unmerited - portion of the gallery space. A look of ungainly, improvised brittleness seems to be what the artist has opted for here and, if so, her success has been total. Any ideas hiding in Wright's metal copse, however, remain rather hidden by the messiness of the piece.
Touring the building site which is central Dublin seems to have had a nasty effect on Ronan, McCrea. For his sculptural installation, Appropriate Measures II, the artist has brusquely sliced, off a corner of the gallery with some plain wooden hoarding, from behind which emanates a Turrelesque wedge of red light. There is no way of knowing what is being built, but it is clear that whatever climbs from these hidden, devilish foundations can hardly constitute renewal.
Like McCrea, Paul Seawright is apparently concerned with running his eye over the membranes, barriers and occlusions which fuel interpretation. Seawright's new photographs are still in his familiar, uncomfortable square format, but the content has now made an unexpected change of direction. Instead of disorienting cropped portraits and grimy institutional interiors, Seawright has here turned his attention to sex shops, and more specifically the grubby curtains which keep them private.
Peter Fitzgerald's conceptual painting also takes a new twist with a set of tiny canvases each representing one of Cindy Sherman's early black and white photographs, reproduced blindfold, from memory. A typically inventive strategy for picking away at the tropes of Sherman's photography in a brazenly subjective manner, this latest detour in Fitzgerald's work is modest and intriguing to almost the same degree.
Phelan and McLoughlin contribute the text of an early message sent by the code's inventor. The message is reproduced twice in the gallery, once in enlarged graphic form and once in the form of a short radio message beamed across the room to a small receiver embedded in the wall. It is a neat trick but the work like Morse's code, is a one note affair.
While much of the work here often feels awkward and improvised, Siobhan Hapaska's slick, poppy pieces take things in the opposite direction, though not to great effect. OldSub, an organic form with a luscious, pearly surface, suspended preternaturally from the gallery wall, and a second, untitled, distinctly disposable sculpture share a careful, controlled finish, but have little else to recommend them.
