Visual art: Getting it together at the RHA

Billy Leahy on two current group shows: the Mark Garry-curated Plane and The Obsessive Garden

Since the mammoth and ungainly Annual Exhibition at the start of the summer, the Royal Hibernian Academy has not placed a foot wrong.

They launched a series of exhibitions from artists who had previously participated in their Eurojet Futures with the intricate, obsessive drawings of Stephen Brandes in Klutz Paradiso in Gallery I.

At the same time in the lower-level Ashford Gallery, Kieron Moore's fantastical, highly sexualised works transported the viewer into bizarre, surreal and unsettling arenas. This has now been replaced by an impressive group show, of which more later.

But the highlight of the post-Annual Exhibition shows, by a substantial whisker, is the group exhibition Plane, which is soon coming to an end in Galleries II & III.

Curated by artist Mark Garry, one of Ireland's Venice Biennale representatives last year, Plane is the fourth exhibition in RHA Director Patrick T Murphy's "artist curate" series, following those of Willie McKeown, Sarah Pierce and Alan Phelan. Garry hand-picked eight young, Irish-based artists who for the most part are heavily engaged with the physical nature of their source materials and whose thematic concerns at times echo his own impressive oeuvre.

Nina Canell's and Robert Watkins' two pieces provide the quite minimal soundtrack to the exhibition, with the tape loop '1+1=1 (handclap)' in Gallery II and the Super 8 film and record player all clicking, rustling and scratching without pause. The combination of audio from the film and the random crackling from the abused record player is a succinctly involving piece whose intriguing nature is based on the consistency of the shaking noises from the movie and the randomness and chance sounds emanating from the turntable.

Sculpture features heavily in the exhibition, with Martha Quinn's 'Sphere Cube' a definite highpoint. The minimal grid structure contains elements of the most basic craftsmanship as well as contemporary architectural values. This piece works well alongside Karl Burke's low-lying wooden sculpture, 'Alter', but both works tend to exist in the shadow of the more attention-grabbing plastic bottle installation/sculpture by Christophe Neumann and Robert Carr's hanging form, which combines the organic and geometric with accomplished effortlessness.

If you don't manage to make it to Ely Place before Monday, the current show in the Ashford Gallery, The Obsessive Garden, is certainly worth making a visit for. Five artists from Birmingham have taken over the space with impressive results. Ian Skoyles' jigsaw works are painstakingly assembled, with the artist combining different sections from a selection of puzzles to create a strange assemblage or unique collage.

This low-art-to-high-art crossover is repeated in Pamina Stewart's animal sculptures created from small seashells, which are a pastiche of seaside-resort kitsch and Graham Chorlton's postcard-inspired paintings. Carl Jaycock's eye-catching photo grids play on ideas of natural selection and grand notions of nationalism, beliefs and colonialism. The cleverly manipulated images are combined to create a portrait of Charles Darwin and the symbolically laden Union Jack.