Carib Art: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean (English-speaking Islands) -- Bermuda Society of Arts at City Hall -- Until June 16 If there is one thing that the so-called English works in the current "Carib Art'' exhibition at City Hall have in common, it is their unmistakable singularity.

For unlike the National Gallery-housed Spanish and French pieces, which are bold of colour, political in nature and generally internationalist in style, the artists of the region's British-colonised islands have captured their admittedly similar subjects -- village life, natural and architectural constructs, their people -- in a vast array of technical and artistic styles, ranging from the haunting pseudo-caricatures of the Belizean artists to the Asian-African simplicity of the sculptures from Jamaica to the largely representational works of our own Bermudian painters.

(Strangely enough, Bermuda is one of the few islands to be included in the exhibition that hasn't seen the development of a so-called national school of artists, yet its contributions -- from Jill Amos Raine's "A View of St.

George's'' to Michael Swan's "Queen of the East'' to Otto Trott's "Builders'' -- seem, at least superficially, among the most synchronistic.) Of course, the works from the English-speaking islands, which form the largest bloc in the "Carib Art'' caravan, do share a number of inherent similarities.

Although, for example, there are a number of religious and/or myth-based works in the show -- see "The Judge of Nations'' by Cayman Islander Gladwyn Bush or "Adam and Eve'' by Carl Abrahams of Jamaica -- they are not as obviously allusive as, say, some of the works from Cuba or Haiti.

Similarly, the artists of the British Caribbean seem, in a comparative sense, to have focused a great deal of their energies on the perfection of technique, particularly with regard to abstractions, the best of which (Jamaican Milton George's "The Wall,'' for example, is exquisite, an expressionistic wonder) can stand among the best of their cultural forebears in Europe and America.

Having said that, though, any temptation -- and it is strong -- to lump these pieces into a single artistic unit is one that really should be resisted.

The viewer, for example, need only look at the way in which women have been represented by these artists -- which, in the end, have simply been grouped together as a matter of convenience -- to get a full appreciation of the variety that is represented in this segment of "Carib Art.'' In "Pregnant Women'' by Eric Winter of the US Virgin Islands, for instance, the females of the region have been shown as soft and beautiful mothers-to-be, while two works from St. Kitts -- Barbara Kassab-Every's "Problems'' and Kevin Tatem's "Women Cry'' -- portray their women/girls in a wearying, wearied light.

In the Jamaican sculptures, moreover, the female subjects seem, in their individual fashions, to be holder-purveyors of hope.

As these particular examples ultimately show, the works in this fine (and finely structured) part of the exhibition encompass all that is good and bad, real and unreal in this particular segment of the region.

Short of an airline ticket to each and every one of the showcased islands, one couldn't really ask for anything more.

DANNY SINOPOLI "TOMORROW III'' BY EDNA MANLEY (JAMAICA) -- Sculptures that portray women as the holder-purveyors of hope.