First, the title. There is nothing wrong with it in terms of its descriptive accuracy, but it does sound dull - worthy but dull - and to that extent it is unfair to what is a very creditable exhibition. Women on Women, at the City Arts Centre, is a group show featuring the work of 11 women artists, curated by Vaari Claffey, who was Gallery Director there from 1995 to 1997 - which relates to another, underlying pattern to her selection. All the participants have exhibited at the Centre over the last five years, so her show offers an interesting insight into its potentially uneasy occupation of a territory that extends into community arts, mainstream painting and sculpture, and mixed media.
There are artists of both sexes who object to the kind of segregation implicit in the project, but it is designed to mark International Women's Day, and it is true that throughout the latter half of the century issues of gender have been central to much artistic debate, and feminist theory has contributed greatly to a reappraisal of arts practice. At the same time, it is fair to say that if something depends on special pleading for its inclusion, then it shouldn't really be there.
In the event, the thematic concern is for the most part obliquely expressed. Louise Walsh's Twins, for example, consists of two photographs of identical twins doing yoga exercises. We get only fragmentary views of them as they adjust each other's limbs, and it is not quite clear what is going on: they could be fighting and in fact their attire and the garishness of the colour makes them look like wrestlers. Maeve Connolly's Bridges juxtaposes a serene, panoramic view of Grattan Bridge and the surrounding city with a slide sequence documenting a night-time walk across the bridge, quite a different experience. Perhaps in the blur and glare of the images of walking there is an implication about the security of women walking alone at night, but even irrespective of that the piece is extremely effective. Connolly takes us from the detached overview and then immerses us in the subjectivity of the experience.
It's something, strikingly, that most of the works set out to do. Anna Hill's superimposed photographs ingeniously combine images of overwhelming spectacle - Monument Valley, dazzling reflections on a lake - with the eye seeing them. Sandra Meehan chronicles a day, both ordinary and fascinating, in the life of a young woman through 215 snapshots. Following the trail of images, we can see the patterns and rhythms of routine emerge. Dorothy Smith alludes to just those domestic routines in her affectionately observed paintings of taps and plugholes, repeated like punctuation marks in time.
Clea Van der Grijn sets calendar time against emotional time in a series of beautiful works on paper that visualise the complex layering of experience. Cliona Harmey plots emotional states on weather maps etched into mirrors, and Margaret O'Keeffe's installation can be seen as a vivid account of the sheer intensity of inner life. The impassioned words and imagery of Deirdre Carr's work perhaps rely too much on intensity of expression. Patricia Hurl and Therry Rudin's installation, a reflection on their artistic collaboration, is cooler, visually compelling, and throws up all sorts of symbolic implications in its imagery.
Fergus Martin, at Green on Red, is a painter of renowned stylistic austerity. With each series he makes, he pares his vocabulary down to a uniform minimum and either repeats a motif entire, or repeats it with variations of scale and proportion. There is just one significant departure from the format that dominates his current show. On the floor of the gallery there is a beautiful, almost flat, painted MDF sculpture. A white central oblong is bound by brown squares at either end.
On the walls, the pictures are monochrome fields of colour, mostly varieties of his favourite neutral brown, but there is a shocking red and a vibrant orange as well. A white oblong eats into each of these colour fields from the top, leaving us to deal with the ambiguous spatial implications. Some of Martin's work on the basis of repetition. Here, although the gallery is spacious and the installation uncluttered by most normal criteria, each piece involves such an architectonic play on its surroundings that you long to see it in isolation. But then, you can always buy one and take it home.
Ken Kiff is an English artist whose work explores a vein of personal fantasy informed by the ambience of fairy tales or fables. He is a sensualist in his use of colour and form. Collectively, his images evoke a consistent world in which each element has a heightened significance, a world of emblematic figures and settings, of pivotal encounters and magical transformations.
In theory, it sounds as if it might all be incredibly twee, but in practice he carries it off brilliantly. More than once his imagery brought the books of Maurice Sendak to mind, or perhaps Sendak crossed with Chagall. Like Chagall, Kiff doesn't have to observe the rules of illustration and narrative that apply in children's books. His images are like allegories of life journeys.
Though Mexican, Alfonso Monreal, showing at the Taylor Gallery, is long resident in Belfast, and he has managed to make his work thoroughly at home in a habitat of Irish references without sacrificing anything of his roots. The result is an eclectic mix of imagery with all the richness of Mexican Baroque, made with a fluent line and seductive colour harmonies. His latest innovation, which he has been playing around with for the past few years, is the incorporation of photographic visual quotations, printed and then over-painted on aluminium. Perhaps at this stage his interwoven layers of imagery can be too subtle. The whole world is there in his frenetic compositions, but it would be nice to see him edit out more of it again.
Women on Women is at the City Arts Centre until April 24th. Fergus Martin is at Green on Red until April 10th. Ken Kiff is at the Graphic Studio Gallery until April 9th. Alfonso Lopez Monreal is at the Taylor Gallery until March 27th.
