Home truths

THE Arlington gallery is easy to find. A lace curtain is not something you would expect to find across the window of an art gallery. It used to be in a home above Camden's Regents bookshop and the new space, a shop with flat above, retains an element of the residential. Imaginatively, the curator has invited seven artists to respond to this domestic space for its opening exhibition at the new site.

This is appropriate as the gallery is one of three run by the Novas group, a non-profit-making organisation which helps the homeless by providing accommodation but also by encouraging its residents to regain self-esteem by telling their own stories. Future exhibitions here will consist of their works.

A sculpture studio is being built in the gallery's namesake, the nearby Arlington House, a massive, still functioning Edwardian hostel for homeless men.

Like commercial galleries, sales are split 50-50 with the artist, but, in this case, the profit is ploughed back into the charity.

Such projects can often be worthy but amateurish. This one isn't.

Rather than smugly crying crocodile tears for the homeless, the artists examine the frustration and oppression as well as the seduction and security of the idea of "home."

Don't we all have a competitive neighbour, whose whiter-than-white nets accuse our own domestic slovenliness?

Gary Martin's sculpture disconcerts with its contradictory allusions. Using traditional deep-button upholstery techniques and vinyl-like materials the surfaces evoke the comfort and familiarity of the living room sofa, but the forms allude to death and destruction.

Two human-sized sculptures greet you. Shaped like Egyptian mummies, they lie side by side on the floor, feet sticking up, headless, inanely white, reminiscent of shrouds or body-bags.

Further on, in the same shiny surface and upholstering technique, brass-coloured resin sheaths a phallic form - shell, missile-head or giant bullet?

Dexter Dymoke uses building materials with which to make elliptical allusions to the psychological deceptiveness of home as safe haven. Frail, weathered wooden struts support the hostile weight of a dark, mass-manufactured brick from which protrudes a tiny but lethal shard of broken glass.

Carpeted stairs lead to the upper galleries, originally the flat above the shop. In the unlit lumber room, Petra Hudcova's poignant installation contrasts the homely sound of two people breathing - perhaps in their sleep - with black-and-white screen images.

Tiny, flickering and intermittently, we glimpse rather than gaze at ghostly wet streets of the city night and other people's homes seen by the outsider, a window here, a door there.

In the former living room, Jeff Sawtell's installation takes a Marxist stance. Using the accessible materials and methods of the office and the graffiti artist, he creates a "secular chapel."

A rose window replaces the fireplace. Plaster cherubs play their silent musical instruments, oblivious to the angry graffiti message which they encircle. "Society 'not fit for purpose' patronising private patronage rather than public patronage."

Three walls are papered with A4 colour print outs showing images from his studio. Books which have informed his life - Marx, Engels, Lenin, Gramsci, Siqueiros.

On another wall there are images of political badges. Soviet ones intermingled with our current and past campaigns - the ANC, Chile, the miners' strike, Hands Off Cuba. The artist's individual space is devoted to the social, outside world. An alcove is devoted to current politics. At the moment, this consists of a newspaper photograph of Jean Charles de Menezes accompanied by an angry poem condemning his murder. This is art with something to say.

The exhibition runs until August 4.