Visual Arts: Reviewed - Daedal(us) 2, The Lab, Foley Street until Feb 10

Here, There & Otherwise, Broadstone Gallery, Hendrons Building, Dominick Street until Feb 18 01-8301428

Esther Shalev-Gerz's Daedal(us) 2, at the Lab Arts Centre, has a tricksey title but hinges on an eloquently simple idea. The photographs that make up the exhibition arose from a project undertaken in 2003, and documented in a film screened in the gallery. Under the auspices of the Fire Station Artists Studios and curator Brigid Harte, Shalev-Gerz explored the Dublin's north-east inner city and photographed the facades of buildings. These images were then projected onto the exteriors of local dwellings by night throughout the month of November.

Straightforward enough. But in the photographs, the ghostly images of buildings on buildings set up a multiplicity of associations. There is a sense of the incremental layers of history that constitute a living city, an intimation of the way buildings replace and displace one another just as, indeed, the area is being substantially remade at the present time. Loss and anticipation are built into the mix of textures as the projected facades, given a monochrome cast by the use of filters, read as memories and seem to belong to the past. All of this is enhanced by the forlorn atmosphere of deserted night-time streets.

The project entailed a series of links between people and places - between the people whose homes were photographed, in whose homes the projectors were sited and onto whose homes the images were projected. References to Daedalus, the archetype of Greek myth, inevitably bring to mind labyrinths. The original Daedalus had to escape from a labyrinth of his own devising. James Joyce's Daedalus wandered his own labyrinth: the streets of Dublin. Shalev-Gerz makes her own labyrinth by doubling and superimposing buildings within a specified area. Like Joyce's protagonist, she tramped the streets in search of appropriate subjects and to engage in the repetitious negotiation that is part of the process for her.

Some of the diplomacy entailed is evident in the accompanying film. The willingness of people to become involved comes across strongly - to be hospitable in response to requests that must seem puzzling. One woman reasonably voices a fear that the projector the crew set up in her window may be mistaken for the paraphernalia of Garda surveillance, given the level of drug dealing that goes on in the area. But she takes the chance.

Appropriately, Daedal(us) 2 is showing in a new inner city venue, the Lab on Foley Street. On a prominent corner site, the Lab occupies a gleaming new building and incorporates an exhibition space spread over two floors, including a wide mezzanine. As is so often the case, the exhibition spaces are liberally interrupted with diversions both practical - including lots of doors for some reason - and architectural - expansive glazed street frontage. Yet despite shortcomings, it is not an unfriendly space, and it is strategically located in a rapidly changing area crying out for cultural activity.

Here, There & Otherwise at Broadstone Gallery and Studios in the Hendrons Building, also occupies a space that is off the beaten track, though one that is a remarkable centre of arts activity, housing many artists and more and more exhibitions. The Broadstone Gallery, previously used intermittently, is a very good, albeit rough space. Somehow one can accommodate the gritty texture of the factory-like room and get on with looking at the art, whereas minor distractions in a pristine, custom-made gallery become noticeable out of all proportion.

Gavin Delahunty has curated a three-person show. The unifying theme, teased out through discussions with each artist, is time. Time, Delahunty explains, in the sense of the present, here and now, in the sense of elsewhere in time, and time stilled by some startling circumstance. It's a sparsely-laid-out show, but careful rather than empty. Michael Warren shows a cluster of wooden, flattened upright columns, against a green painted background. They lean against the wall and the base of each curves gracefully, as though bowing to gravity. A blurred photographic image is half-visible on one. A square block of wood, blue pigment soaked into the grain, hangs on the wall like a painting.

There is a memorial air to the installation, as though it pays tribute to a particular time or event. In the centre of the space, Rhona Byrne's merry-go-round, a utilitarian construction that wouldn't be out of place in a playground, offers the possibility of escape into an endlessly repeated present. Finally, Seamus Harahan's startling video documents an evening in a shebeen in east Tyrone. The spartanly appointed domestic interior looks like something from a rural Ireland jumping back several decades. It is occupied by determined drinkers and smokers. They engage in lively conversation and lapse into private memories and reflections; they sing songs and try - not always successfully - to remember the words of songs. It's not immediately obvious whether the work of each artist corresponds to just one of Delahunty's criteria but Harahan's atmospheric video, in which the camera is perhaps too self-consciously agitated and jumpy, is an island in time, and also strangely out of time.

The Irish Architects Benevolent Society, with the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), has organised a fund-raising art auction at the Irish Architectural Archive, 45 Merrion Square, tomorrow evening at 8pm, preceded by a wine reception from 6pm to 7.30pm. It will feature work by a large number of artists, including Arthur Gibney, Nancy Larchet, Patrick Scott, SeáMulcahy, Seán Rothery and many more. All the artists are also architects, though not necessarily practising now. The lowest reserve is €250.