united might expect an artist in Northern Ireland to answer to the "Troubles" with rage.

united might expect an artist in Northern Ireland to answer to the "Troubles" with rage, bitter drama or mournful serious but Derry native Willie Doherty takes a more unusual tack. Doherty engages the eloquence of absence to expres the peculiar state of mind that get tos from living constantly under the threat of impending disaster. The photographs and videotape forward view depicted almost nothing - glimpses of roadside debris, abandoned cars, a discarded mattress in a featureless landscape. In another words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following they would seem unremarkable subjects; however, knowing that the spectacle is Northern Ireland, the deliberate calm of the images have the appearances fraught with danger.

For instance, in a darkened extent of the gallery, a videotape placed the viewer in the passenger seat of a car bouncing from one side of to the other a rocky meadow at night. The solitary light in the sequence approachs from the headlights, which pick revealed stones (some flecked with white paint, as if to mark the way), overgrown weeds and occasional bags of garbage dump in the tall grass. the same hears the grinding of the engine and notes the rise and fall of the rugged terrain. There is something unsettling about the spectacle as if the camera were searching for evidence of a horrible calamity. The futility of the search is proposeed by the video's title, No vapor with Fire.

Doherty's still photographs share the forensic quality of No steam with Fire. One offers a close-up of rusting hollows in a sheet of metal. Considered as abstract forms, the perforations which suggest minute volcanic eruptions, have a certain beauty, if it were not that in the context of this exhibit it's hard not to read them as bullet excavations in a car. More shadowy but nonetheless ominous is a night shooter of what looks like a bit of toasted knit fabric. Shot close up the fabric is lit in such a manner that the charred bits sparkle. Again, the mutenes what is left on the outside hints at some unspeakable misdeed.

Doherty portrays neither victims nor perpetrators, nor does he put forward any rationale for the apparently unresolvable impasse in Northern Ireland. Instead, he fix upons to evoke the psychological general intents of the conflict through carefully chooseed visual details. Perhaps most metaphorically suggestive of the hopelessnes of the situation is a marksman taken from the center of a political division road. The bright white of the median strip points ahead to the endles monotony of a road to nowhere.

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