THE title of the show that opened last Sunday at the Bermuda Arts Centre at Dockyard last week is "Off The Wall" ? and it lives up to its billing mainly in that there isn't a lot on the walls and not much else either. "Off The Wall" has several possible interpretations for an art show. It can imply that one might expect to see a good deal of sculpture, but unfortunately there isn't much. It can imply a good measure of humour, but unfortunately there isn't much of that either. It might also imply a measure of oddity and weirdness, but there is not much of that. Indeed there isn't much at all, with only 39 works on show.

Lynn Morell's happily has both humour and oddity. Her dilemma is a pair of papier mach? snail like creatures entwined together in the coils of a snake. One snail is dotted with minute "no"s and, the other with "yes"s. Impaled on the horns of the snails is a tortured humanoid figure. My only difficulty with what would otherwise have been a chuckle worthy delight was that it was indeed off the wall, but not far enough away from the wall to enable the viewer to walk around it. As a general rule sculpture is designed to be seen in the round and should be shown accordingly.

Mrs. Morell's other work, a quilt entitled Where was one of her rare failures. It showed a rather dreary group of men, the last of which was a blank shape with a miniature rope ladder trailing down to the ground. The humour, such as it was, was painfully obvious.

Actually off the wall and circumnavigable was Joyce Joell Hayden's . Despite an elaborate explanation on the nearby wall the work failed as humour and as art. Done in papier mach? over wire the figure of a headless suited man leaned alarmingly and the gaudy paint on its suit was anything but corporate.

Spread over much too much of the floor was a multitude of pieces of paper folded in greeting card style and printed with an endless series of hand prints of a representation of a bowl. This work, or perhaps I should say toil, by Kok Wan Lee is only "Off The Wall" in the sense that it was on the floor and getting in the way. I have never commented on the price of an artist's work before, but $20 each for his seems excessive by any standard. That produces the staggering total of $3,080 for a dreary bunch of similar monochrome prints on bits of folded paper. I must admit that I didn't bother to count them, but assume that there really were 154 of them.

Not all, however, was lost. Those that didn't attempt humour or weirdness with obvious intent were the better part of the show. Jason Harris' intriguing, heavily textured nocturnal scenes have become familiar; so familiar in fact that in a couple of cases I though I had seen the work before.

Lexy Tibbets, an artist new to the exhibition scene, looks a little as though she were getting in practice for the next Biennial. is a checker board of black and white squares, the white ones containing some fascinating prints that bear a close look. The gimmick takes the form of four paint brushes hung high on the wall above the work, ostensibly dripping their coloured paint over the surface of the main work. I liked her , an abstract of sunny colour scheme more than the rather less contained scheme of . More consciously humorous was , where a picture of a girl of an earlier time is listening to a conch shell. It is mounted in a sea of nets punctuated by a star fish.

I tend not to comment on Helle Puck's ceramics because I know so little about ceramic work, but the juxtaposition of withwas both charming and humorous. But the most off the wall, and off the floor too, for that matter, pieces in the show were Deirdre Furtado's , and, a wild trio of banana and palm dolls flying through the air for all the world like the three horsewomen of the apocalypse. They are imaginative, festive, somewhat alarming, and very much alive.

THE Wet Paint Auction in aid of the Kaleidoscope Arts Foundation held at the defunct Elliott School, now being converted into an art school for children was more fun than enough last Saturday, but impossible to review. Some paintings were donated, but definitely not done that day, others arrived very late, and there was no theme. In fact it was quite hard to see much at all because of the enthusiastic crowd and the rather perilous hanging method that consisted of string and clothes pins.

The cause is worthy and the crowd was positive and supportive. It is a valuable service to the community and deserves all the support it can get.