Reviewed:

Three Decades, Three Works: Kevin Atherton, Arthouse until May 22nd (016056800);

AKA (After Kafka's Amerika): Eamon O'Kane, Hallward Gallery until May 11th (016621482);

The Outrider Drawings: Megan Eustace, The Paul Kane Gallery until May 20th (016703141);

Newcomers: David Kiely, Original Print Gallery until May 27th (01-6773657)

Kevin Atherton's Three Decades, Three Works is a notably terse summary of his adventures in multi-media, and also a brave one, given the way both the technology and artists' fluency in it have developed within the show's generous time-span. In fact, all three pieces, while technically proficient, do have a certain home-made "let's put the show on right here in the barn" quality about them, exaggeratedly so in the early, grainy video footage, but also in the relatively slick virtual-reality opus, Gallery Guide. This is a feature, not a failing, of the work, and it arises partly, perhaps, because of Atherton's bluff, growly delivery as a performer. That and because, despite the technology, his presence as performer and dramatist is dominant in each case (witness the way Gallery Guide accommodates live performance).

He interviews himself (pre-recorded) in In Two Minds; debates, a little awkwardly, with the cast of Coronation Street in Television Interview; and is a pedantic and verbose exhibition tour guide in Gallery Guide. The latter is a formidable and hugely entertaining piece of work consisting of a tour of an elaborate virtual-reality exhibition. Atherton's stance as an artist, as opposed to his various stances as a performer within the artworks, is always sceptical and interrogative of the form, so that he invariably keeps a satirical distance between himself and his material.

Perhaps his long teaching experience (he is currently head of the MA virtual realities course at NCAD) has something to do with this, but there is also, it must be said, a slightly defensive quality to it. There is certainly a strong pedagogic overtone to all three pieces in this show, culminating in Gallery Guide's cautionary commentary on the pretensions of contemporary cultural packaging, its all too recognisable parodies of art and art-speak.

Eamon O'Kane is an artist of prodigious energy and application, and his Hallward Gallery show, AKA (After Kafka's Amerika), is testament to these qualities, comprising well over 200 individual works. Admittedly, most of them are more or less postcard size, but every such "postcard" is a painted, snapshot-like representational image, so we're talking about an enormous investment of time and effort. These images look like paintings of photographs, which invites the question: why not use the photographs?

The show's title refers to Kafka's imagined America, a dream of freedom, hope and wide open spaces - albeit in a Kafka-esque vein - dreamt by someone who never actually left Europe, never mind reached the New World. O'Kane's images read like a travelogue, a wide-eyed, excited documentation of everything archetypically American. You don't have to accept Jean Baudrillard's thesis - that the US is more or less a theme-park representation of itself, it is Disneyland - to recognise that when you encounter it you will inevitably match the real thing with the endlessly represented, endlessly mythologised America you carry in your head.

So it could be that O'Kane is offering us layers of representation: America filtered through Kafka's imaginings and his own preconceptions, paralleled by his matter-of-fact exploration of the place, with the implication that we can never quite get beyond those representational layers. There is, though, a distinctly affirmative air to his sightseeing, a sense that he believes America's promise of reinvention and happy endings. Yet in the end, in a very American way, the sheer logistics of the work in his show seem to outweigh the pay-off.

Megan Eustace has made drawing the basis of her artistic activity, which is unusual, all the more so given that she is not in any obvious way a virtuoso. Her drawing is characterised by the worried, nervous quality of its line, by accumulated, laboured indecision, doubts and deferrals - the opposite of that spontaneity and precision that are generally regarded as desirable traits. She has a lot more in common with the almost sickly introspection of Horst Jensen or our own Charles Cullen than with the crisp design of Matisse.

The fascination of her work derives from the fact that her hesitant method somehow enables her to allude convincingly to intense, perhaps traumatic qualities of experience, to suggest a sense of inner life pulsing away with its own priorities behind the world of appearances. The title of her show at the Paul Kane Gallery, The Outrider Drawings, refers, she says, to the exploratory nature of what she is doing. What she is doing here is divided between highly, perhaps overly, mannered quotations from classical nudes and rougher contemporary life studies. Among the best pieces are two relatively straightforward male torsos.

David Kiely's Newcomers, at the Original Print Gallery, addresses feelings attendant on the experience of immigration. Chances are that without being told that, or picking it up from the titles, you would not guess it from looking at his drypoints and carborundums. Yet, like the work in his previous show, which explored emotionally charged recollections of a place via apparently dry topographical studies, this new body of work does pack quite an emotional punch. The prints are dark, beautifully textural evocations of mood and, with only a little prompting, you do indeed pick up intimations of estrangement, melancholy and unease from their slow, engrossing surfaces.