Visual Arts: Art Critic Aidan Dunne reviews a number of events currently open in Dublin.

Necessary Journeys, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, until October 31st (01-6710073).

Tracy Staunton: 10 Dreams In Dublin, Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, until November 1st (01-8740064)

Albert Irvin, Peppercanister Gallery, Dublin, until October 31st (01-6611279)

Jane Proctor: Stones And Other Drawings, Ashford Gallery, Dublin, until October 23rd (01-6617286)

Tacita Dean's Trying To Find The Spiral Jetty, in Necessary Journeys, a group show curated by Vaari Claffey, is something of a shaggy-dog story. It's an audio account of the artist's difficult and ultimately inconclusive attempt to find Robert Smithson's archetypal earth artwork Spiral Jetty, in Utah. Dean candidly remarks that she is still unsure whether she found the submerged jetty.

Was her journey really necessary? The point in this context could be that she felt motivated to do it and was honest enough to report what happened to her. You can certainly empathise with her uncertainty even though it doesn't amount to great art. It is the fact that she is left with a question rather than a mission simply accomplished that makes it interesting.

Ian Whittlesea's The Sandwalk, which consists of just those words meticulously painted in sans-serif typeface on a small canvas, refers to a minor journey. But it was a minor journey following a vastly greater one and within the space of which an enormous mental leap was taken. It refers to the route of Charles Darwin's daily walk after his voyage on the Beagle, at a time in his life when he was digesting the results of his journey and precipitating humans on a journey into their own unimagined past.

The imperative for travel described in Stephen Brandes's work is different again. A series of schematic drawings imaginatively reconstructs the journey of his grandmother, forced to flee her home on the Romanian-Ukrainian border with and then without her family. It is a story that resonates still. You get the idea. It is a discursive show, exploring some of the imperatives for travel, emotional, intellectual, practical. Sophie Calle, Katie Holten, Jeremy Deadman, Dean Hughes, Grace Weir and Bernard Smith are the other participants. Best approached as a series of anecdotes, it shouldn't disappoint.

Tracy Staunton's 10 Dreams In Dublin is about the transience of individual human presences against the background of the city. The ghostly touch of past lives and experiences is imprinted on the architectural fabric in any number of ways, and she is drawn to the way personal histories can subtly infuse the atmospherics of place. Appropriately enough her show is itself a kind of evocation of something absent.

A couple of map-like prints of Dublin city in dreamy, muted, soft colour place the artist in the position of the angel in Wim Wenders's Wings Of Desire, surveying the day-to-day business of the city in terms not of external traffic, labour and leisure but of inner lives. Staunton's project was to find her way into some of the rooms in the city that were temporarily or permanently uninhabited, rooms in which she could, in a sense, commune with the spirits of those who had lived or worked there.

She printed images directly onto the walls and left them. They will eventually disappear. Some are already gone. They are recorded in photographs and video, and the bulk of her show consists of this documentation, pointers to something that happened elsewhere.

It is a rash, even a brave thing to do in practical terms. You could argue that by abandoning her work to the vagaries of decorators and developers she is precluding its usefulness to herself and potential viewers, but the process is conceptually consistent.

She has long been concerned with the idea of the personal within the public, and in evoking lost inner histories in this way she has significantly developed her working methods. What we see in the gallery are traces or echoes, but they open up to us these depicted spaces - and other imaginative spaces, spaces for reflection and dreaming.

Underpinning Albert Irvin's paintings are grids. So far so standard for a particular kind of abstract painting. But Irvin's grids are usually skewed, given an enlivening tilt, one tactic among many in a repertoire devoted to energising the pictorial field. Others include an incredible level of sustained attack.

His work has a clear affinity with American abstract expressionism, but he is also an action painter in the literal sense of vigorous, physical engagement with the painting.

He is always willing to up the ante in terms of colour, exploiting the wayward qualities of acrylic pigment expertly in building vivid and buoyant patterns. The fast pace, lightness of touch and penchant for bright hues may together make the whole thing look easy. But just try it. You're likely to end up with a muddy, inert mess in place of Irvin's pyrotechnics.

He identifies his paintings in terms of place, and the many references to Ireland indicate the extent to which he has developed ties here over the years.

Although there are architectural qualities in his work, from the street grid of towns and cities to the quatrefoil pattern, they are not illustrative of particular places. Perhaps they relate more to the experience of being in a place, one buzzing with interest and possibilities.

In Stones And Other Drawings Jane Proctor builds up densely textured drawings with Indian inks. There are two kinds of work in her show, those in which she creates an all-over field of textural marks and those in which she introduces divisions, usually with the use of areas of gold leaf.

There is quite a disjuncture between heavily worked ink and expanses of gold, so much so that the two are never quite integrated within the space of each piece - which may be part of the artist's intentions.

Even when she generates all-over textures, it should be said, she likes to introduce something else, often in the form of nuggets or clusters of darker masses of ink. The fact that she cites stones in the show's title suggests a landscape or geological reference, and it's not too fanciful to see equivalents to the way rock is formed in her various pictorial strategies, from closely layered strata to crystalline concentrations.

It is an agreeable body of work, delivered with evident ability, but it lacks the sense of visual possibility that might lend it a vital edge.