Rob Gallagher

We owe to feminism the insight that patriarchy has long relied on women for all sorts of unpaid but essential labour - cooking, darning, tending to sons maimed in wars etc. Looking at this exhibition, I'm struck by the extent to which the art world relies on at least one other strain of wageless female labour: producing heartfelt adolescent daubings and scribblings about celebrities.

Like Karen Kilimnick, Stella Vine and Elizabeth Peyton, Chantal Joffe and Dawn Mellor - both represented here - make paintings that crib the naif style and channel the hormonal charge of teenage girls' attempts to emulate images of beauty. Both artists are interested in the mutations generated by the failure of such attempts - this, at least, is the theoretical pretext for their studied cackhandedness.

Mellor's second hand subjects often look half-zombiefied; the skew-whiff Catherine Deneuve here, rendered in nauseous greens and magentas and covered in scribbles, looked well on her way to decomposing. Joffe's Josephine Topless, meanwhile, does the Joffe thing of warping an image of female beauty until the subject starts to look less sweet 'n' sexy than subnormal 'n' panicked - proving just how fine the line between these states can be.

Elke Krystufek does a similar number on Van Dyck's portrait of Sir John Suckling, rendering the prettified poet in blue and black strokes suggestive of a lovestruck biro doodle. Jemima Stehli's Strip no. 5, Dealer also seemed to be an homage of sorts, riffing on a celebrated Helmut Newton photo to gesture at the sexless and technical hard work involved in inciting consumer desire.

Claire Pestaille's diced and latticed b&w images of silver screen beauties foreground femininity's construction too, the scissored stars' multiple eyes and hands and nipples suggesting the media's simultaneous reproduction and dismemberment of its lust objects. Gender politics aside, Pestaille's works also possess a pretty, deco-esque shimmer.

Which is kind of the thing: notionally a show about deconstructing myths of feminine allure (that, at least, was what I gleaned from the seriously grammarphobic press release), the tone was less Dworkinite ire, more melancholy resignation to the sad fact that real life tends to lag behind photoblogs and neo-realist cinema in the glamour stakes.

Fittingly, only one piece ventured out of the confines of the second dimension, and then only tentatively: Simon Bedwell's untitled collage confronts viewers with a centrefold through whose snipped-out crotch you can see a peephole (or gloryhole?) drilled in the gallery wall. How's that for depth?