Digital love

Billy Leahy visits the cosy Gallery for One and the cached attic gallery to get away from the Christmas mania and stroll through the worlds of four young photographers exploring the relationships between subject, artist and camera

With chock-a-block city streets brimming with the frustrated and chaotic Christmas masses, elbowing and clawing their way into consumerism's dream, the silence and solitude of art galleries can offer a little respite at this time of year. Not that they don't get in on the act too – what with the ubiquitous group shows offering the more plush among us the chance to find the most elusive of gifts: an original Christmas present.

However, not all galleries are joining in the festive mayhem and there are several spaces in which to seek sanctuary around Dublin city centre. Ironically, one such gallery is housed inside a clothes store in Temple Bar. Gallery for One has been operating for the past three years, under the guidance of curator Vaari Claffey, at the back of 5 Scarlet Row on West Essex Street. Boasting dimensions that cannot exceed two square meters and located when you might expect to find the changing rooms, Gallery for One is one of the more unusual exhibition spaces in the capital. It is also one gaining a deserved reputation for inspired and innovative shows.

The current exhibition at Gallery for One, Make Love to the Camera, is by up-and-coming Northern Ireland-born artist Suzanna Mooney. The show consists of two slide projections that simultaneously display complementary images that explore the very nature of photography. One projector shows slides of Mooney's own drawings, which aesthetically are a pastiche of line-draw illustrations from a 1970s photography manual. Each of Mooney's images shows a glamour model in various poses as well as the suggested lighting and camera set-up, with the objectification of the subject creating an uneasy feel.

Meanwhile, the second projector displays photographs of photographers at work or portraits of those usually behind the lens, with most of the pictures harvested and gleaned from newspapers and magazines. The result is an understated piece that, armed with a definite humour, succeeds in turning the focus onto the nature of photography itself, with a quietly playful examination of the relationship between the photographer, the subject and the camera.

This relationship also comes under the spotlight in the work of Swedish-born artist Emelie Lidström, who is one of three artists showing at another of the city's concealed spaces, the attic gallery. Located at number 3 Clare Street – above a recruitment agency and in the shadow of the National Gallery – the attic gallery is not the easiest place to find. But when you do, it is worth the effort. Splendid Isolation is just the fourth exhibition in the space, which was opened by media company One Productions with the idea of handing young artists their debut show.

Lidström's five self-portraits humorously explore the same connection between the photographer, the subject and the camera as Mooney, but this time the artist hides herself just out of shot, with the camera's trigger lead the only clue to her whereabouts. Davey Moor's four photographs and accompanying text look at the relationship between internal and external landscapes, with both a physically and metaphorical meaning coming through in his work.

German artist Grace Schwindt is firmly behind the camera in her series Ten in Berlin, which focuses on the hopes and aspirations of children in the transitional period between childhood and adolescence. Schwindt photographs the children in their rooms in an effort to gain an insight into their everyday lives, while in the accompanying catalogue she poses questions to her subjects, such as 'what is love?' while asking them what they would change about the world. And, no – less frenzied Christmas shoppers was not one of the answers.

?More Make Love To The Camera continues at Gallery for One, 5 Scarlet Row, West Essex Street, Dublin 8 until 24 December. Splendid Isolation runs at attic gallery, Clare Street until 6 January