SHOWING off, displaying lens based women artists, comes complete with catalogue essays rich in safe enough references to perceptions of the historical disempowerment of Northern Ireland women artists. It was however, with foreboding that this reviewer went on to learn of the group's democratic non selectivity and of rejections of `elitism' a rejection which can often mean abandonment of quality control. But indeed, the catalogue is thus fair preparation for what is to be seen in this showing of still photography, video and computer generation technical excellence and poetic narrative strength side by side with the banal the obvious and the depressingly derivative or vacantly pretentious.
. Northern Ireland which was considered neither cosmopolitan nor adult enough in 1994 for a planned showing of curator Naoimi Salaman's `What She Wants' photographic exploration of women's erotic images of men still lacks, so goes the argument, the cultural space claimed by other UK feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus Showing off must be surely judged on more than its parade of diversity.
Among the memorable are Jill Jennings's stylishly evocative memory monochromes, Amanda McKittrick's richly coloured exploration of Celtic fantasy and Moira McIver's romantic Cibachromatic documentation of the artifacts of pilgrimage. Mhairi Sutherland's slide show of domestic paraphernalia drawer, scissors, crumpled bed, shower may be read as a banal comment on the banal or as a nail biting thriller. Fun too are Derval FitzGerald's tongue in cheek documentary interventions into the exhibition itself and Karen Vaughan's wry observances on the obligatory clinical nature of the ivory tower world of exhibitions per se. However, a little selectivity (however abhorrent to some) would have gone a long way to making a better case for further space to be allocated in this the north's most prestigious gallery to future group of lens based women artists.
