If there is a unifying theme to this years Bermuda Society of Arts' “Group of 5” show at their City Hall Gallery it surely must be ambiguity.

The five artists assembled by Kok Wan Lee have produced a remarkable total of 76 works between them and almost none of them can be said to have an unambiguous directness; all, however, sustain a level of fascination that runs throughout the show.

The immensely prolific Kok Wan Lee himself is showing three groups of abstracts. The first group, “Growing one - ten”, all in oil pastels on paper, are abstractions with a measure of the surreal content of trees rendered in a wide variety of colour schemes and sizes.

Some are clearly intended as pairs, others are individual. All make up a distinctive set. The ancestor of this repetitive treatment is clearly Monet, but Mr. Lee's work is anything but derivative.

His other two series, “Blooming one - six” and “Breathing one - three” are even more abstracted, the first set perhaps of an orchard stretching away over a hill,the second defying a subject altogether.

Either could equally well have been inspired by an advancing dust storm in the desert. Again his colour schemes are distinctive and varied. Mr. Lee has an entirely different profession and one only regard his extraordinary output with awe.

Peter Lapsley remains fixated on, or perhaps obsessed with his faceless,almost formless, colourless human figures. Here they are usually tiny and consumed within vast spaces or they make up large crowds or groups with varying intensities.

This group of ten works entitled “Crowd of One”culminates in his expectable trinity in a large acrylic on canvas, but the group seems intended to convey the essential loneliness of man.

His “Origins” series, four works in a mixed media of clay, acrylic and soil (curiously numbered III-VI), isolate the same lonely figure even more while the final work, appropriately called “Destination” is a small three-dimensional work presumably representing a sarcophagus for his amorphous little men.

At the other end of the gallery are seven black and white mixed media works by Daniel Benson. These reflect Mr. Lapsley's trinity obsession, this time with more defined figures, each trinity recognisably male.

Each depicts the same man in the same usually agonised or otherwise distressed pose thrice-repeated in different renditions. They are untitled and make up a thoroughly disconcerting but certainly intriguing set of works.

The “odd man out” among the four painters is its only woman, Sue Grass,whose work is as different from the other three as is her gender. Her work,in acrylic, is representational after a fashion.

Her subjects are both eclectic and eccentric and don?t hesitate to borrow effects usually seen in other media. Her two “Night Drive” works employ the streaked light effect usually found in slow photographic exposures.

The larger of the two, an emphatic work facing the gallery entrance, I took to be a protest against the very illegal advertising banner stretched between two palm trees at Fourways Inn.

To me her most interesting, because the most ambiguous and thus most suited to the show's apparent theme, was a diptych of Warwick Long Bay. At first glance it is a straightforward representation of sand, waves and sea arranged on two adjacent square canvasses, one set slightly lower than the other.

The sand and waves form a continuous visual sequence. The horizon does not, producing the unnerving ambiguity. The painterly quality of the work is excellent, and differs refreshingly from the usual rendition of this commonly painted subject.

Two strongly representational scenes of the Dockyard, if not intended as a protest at the disgraceful neglect inflicted by WEDCO on one of our two most important historic areas, may easily be taken as such.

In an island where affordable housing is scarce, these derelict houses, so starkly rendered,serve as a blow to the solar plexus of the sensitive viewer.

21 three-dimensional works by Julie Hastings-Smith round out the show admirably. This artist's talent is as varied as she is prolific. Her work ranged from attractive ceramic bowls in classic shapes, some with amusingly eccentric embellishments, to the admirable bronze “Bert Bird”, an irrepressibly pert cartoon character of a bird already sold before the show opened.

Her other bronzes ranged from “stick figure” couples with remarkable movement and emotion to cartoon style fish. To me easily the most intriguing of her works were the eight ceramic “Torso Series”.

These are clearly anatomically derived, if both exaggerated and elongated, but in a few cases are so extremely ambiguous in effect as to appear phallic rather than torsoid.

Once again the reorganised Bermuda Society of Arts demonstrates its versatility and vitality. A downside of this is the rapidly changing shows mounted there. The present one will only be on view for just over a week after this review appears. Don't miss it.