"Thank you for your open house and place of imagination" reads a comment in the visitors' book. The Impressions Gallery, a converted Georgian house set incongruously amid York's tourist attractions, infiltrates the city's medieval ambience with glimpses of modern visual culture.
A few sparks of artistic irreverence, untamed by the academic conventions of today's photo-art, might have helped to disrupt the rather homely atmosphere of the present exhibition. Domestic Stories attempts to reflect on the touchingly inadequate ways in which we embody personal histories in banal objects of sentimental value.
The things with which we fill our mantelpieces and snap albums can become talismans of the places, situations and relationships to which we belong or from which we have been exiled. Unless we are ingenious artistic autobiographers, such things become the icons of emotional identity by which our descendants remember us.
The whole nature of images and objects of sentimental value is that they are private and particular to ourselves. To others, they are fit only for the skips from which, for decades now, dada-inclined art students have been rescuing them in order to construct fictional assemblages. Yet the three artists here stick religiously to the deadpan facts of their personally chosen subjects.
Leslie Hakim-Dowek looks at the "homes" of immigrants. Her photo-works make more poignant sense when accompanied by the oral histories hidden in a casually displayed book. The home-from-homes documented by Rowan Drury are institutions: a convent, a women's open prison, a school for boys with behavioural problems.
The cataloguing of mantelpiece items (religious icons next to Daniel O'Donnell videos) is complemented by give-away glimpses of domestic unbelonging (a note that reads "Do as staff ask, without contradicting").
In her photo and video series, Petra Creffield superimposes images from her deceased mother's snap album on to the walls of the family home, now occupied by students. Faded portraits haunt the student clutter of Chinese paper lamps, mucky lace curtains and a roadwork sign. Little did those anonymous students know that, with the inappropriate re-siting of that rusted old sign, they would introduce a welcome note of creative awkwardness into an exhibition that is so top-heavy with thematic and aesthetic sobriety.
• Until October 13. Details: 01904 654724.
