Visual Arts/Reviewed: Lost in the Rhythm, Matt Stokes, Temple Bar Gallery until Feb 24 (01-6710073)
Mindgames II, Chris Doris, Paul Kane Gallery until Feb 3 (087-6478423)
Andrew Vickery, Royal Hibernian Academy Gallagher Galleries II & III until Feb 25 (01-6612558)

Matt Stokes's Lost in the Rhythm is an amalgam of cultural anthropology, social history and art. Or, more accurately perhaps, he is one of many contemporary artists whose work centres on sociological research. Large parts of his show consist of memorabilia and artefacts, displayed in a quasi-museum manner. The juxtaposition of material is interesting and informative in itself, but there is more as well. Something beyond research emerges from the process, most obviously his short film, Long After Tonight, made in 2005.

Stokes explores musical subcultures. The Northern soul scene, going back to the 1970s, is the subject of Long After Tonight, which reunites "soulies" in the powerfully atmospheric setting of a Scottish Episcopalian church in Dundee.

The film is dark, intense and hypnotic. Stokes draws on the religious iconography of the church, outside and in, to illuminate the communal and ritualistic, even reverent, nature of the dance session for the participants. The music provides a shared space for them, a commonality of purpose and identity, as affirmative and legitimate as religious faith for the Episcopalians.

This becomes relevant when you consider the more diverse works that make up the balance of the show, most of them drawn from Real Arcadia. Following on from a residency in the Lake District in 2003, Stokes has been documenting a series of cave raves that took place there in the early 1990s.

The speaker arrays that made up the sound system are in the gallery, plus a wealth of material including cassette tapes, T-shirts, flyers, photographs, newspaper clippings. All come under the Real Arcadia. Most telling of all, perhaps, is a Granada Television news report from August 1991 from the cave site.

The implication is that the cave raves represent a threat of some kind. The risk of a catastrophic rock collapse is invoked. There are references to drink and drugs - the camera rather pathetically focuses on a few drink cans on the ground. What comes across, though, is the feeling that the establishment just doesn't like the raves.

Stokes's achievement is to provide a sense of the idealistic, Utopian impulse underlying the prosaic business of organising and staging raves as set against the forces of order and conformity. Rather shockingly, the caves were demolished to bring the raves to a halt. Not quite the Taliban, perhaps, but there's an uncomfortable echo of the same kind of intolerance.

Incidentally, there's an off-beat live element to Stokes's show. At 8pm on Feb 14, Sacred Selections at Christ Church Cathedral features organ transcriptions of underground music, performed by Paul Ayres.

Chris Doris's Mindgames II at the Paul Kane Gallery features works in two radically divergent idioms, one a group of spare, minimally articulated abstracts, the other a series of photographic collage and brush drawings.

The former are slow and meditative, the latter fast, impassioned and expressive. Both are pretty good and, intriguingly given that the different kinds of work are intermingled throughout, the show as a whole works very well, something that is all the more striking given that the biggest piece, a composite grid of uniformly blue-painted squares, is one of a kind in the context of everything else on view.

It's from Doris's Satsangh series of paintings. Like the smaller Wave pieces, it has a calm, meditative air. The rhythmic Waves are built up from thousands of minute ink circles, evoking a trance-like state of contemplative making. A dramatic change of gear and we're into the brush collages, which are often didactic in tone. Each is accompanied by an aphoristic snippet from Eastern or Western thinkers and Doris seems to have some kind of spiritual, intellectual synthesis in mind.

The representational pieces invite us to look at aspects of our individual lives and the contemporary world in general from an alternative, hinted-at perspective.

Andrew Vickery's Gallagher Gallery exhibition is his most substantial here to date. It comprises two sequences of paintings, arranged conventionally on the walls but also co-opted into another form of presentation, as elements of slide-shows framed by miniature theatres. The simplified, flattened mode of representation makes sense in the theatrical context, recalling the grammar of stage sets.

One thinks of Maurice Sendak's mechanical toys, illustrations and theatrical work and, as with Sendak and the Brothers Grimm, there is a sense with Vickery of things going on beneath the surface. He uses the traditional forest setting as a staging device for the dramas that unfold, if obliquely, in his paintings.

There are people in the paintings, though usually they are not directly seen - the drivers and passengers in the cars and buses for example - and when they are they tend to be anonymous, subsumed into a group identity, like the virtually uniformed crowd in a gay bar and disco in Beyond the Sea. But the main characters never appear. More often, other things stand in for them: two coffee cups, an unmade bed, discarded clothing, domestic interiors configured according to exact individual preferences. We piece together a chronicle of a relationship.

In all of this there is a recurrent pattern of transience. It is oddly reminiscent of Hollywood's rare attempts at making first-person movies, in which the action is filmed from the viewpoint of the main protagonist, and there is a similar sensation of distance.

As Patrick Murphy notes in his catalogue essay, "an alienation, a peculiar aloneness" comes through. The painter is an observer of his own experience as he moves through these places and encounters. Not that it is emotionally cold. His attentiveness to detail is full of feeling, and he manages to convey the way the most ordinary things become charged with meaning when one is emotionally engaged.