According to the brochure accompanying this exhibition it "investigates the relationships between identity and the spaces we use to define that identity".

The five artists selected by the curator Dean Butters (also one of the exhibitors) have very distinctive artistic personae and play with the professed theme of identity in very individual ways. The coherence of the overall statement, however, raises some questions that – while not diminishing the efficacy of individual works – does raise the issue of their combination.

Evan Baden's Technically intimate consists of seven pigment inkjet prints, each 101cm by 127cm. Baden's methodology is important. He finds an image online and then, in tandem with others, recreates that image to the format seen in the exhibition.

Each image is titled with (presumably) the name of the females in the tableaux formed by Baden and his unnamed (unknown) accomplices.

Megan (2009) provides an exemplar for the works in this series. The protagonist, Megan, stands provocatively in her bedroom, a room replete with the lush colours that characterise a set for a pin-up, a décor straight out of Playboy or the like.

Pink is pervasive and appears on curtains, bed linen, wardrobes, laptop cover and a handbag draped over the bedstead. The room is also furnished with pin-up images of Britney Spears and other (unnamed or certainly unknown to me!) partially clad females. Most tellingly, a strip of Andy Warhol's Marilyns sit above the garish curtains. Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" springs to mind.

Megan covers her breasts with her right hand, her left placed invitingly on her left hip. She is wearing blue lace panties, otherwise she is naked.

She turns towards the laptop opened on her bed and is seemingly taking a "selfie", ostensibly within the privacy of her bedroom. But Baden is openly questioning the levels of privacy that are at play in the technological world.

The layering here is clever and pointed. Megan is taking a "selfie", posing for herself or at least for someone she would like to see this image, but the latter is up for grabs in the ethereal world of www.

She is voyeur of herself, the viewer becomes voyeur and the artist becomes uber-voyeur. Megan is also, within the confines of this image, posing for the "pin-ups" scattered around her room. Her privacy is non-existent, in both a micro and macro sense.

Baden's point is that today there is no privacy once an image gets "out there". Private sexuality becomes public property. Baden's visual language is complex and multivalent and it is also seductive.

Aimee Fitzgerald is also interested in the making of a work of art.

She is examining "the tensions between painting and photography as representational mediums". Nothing new in this, since questions about the role of each medium has continued since Nicephore Niepce began his photographic experiments in 1816.

Fitzgerald is really more concerned with notions of "the image" in her beautifully elided portrait visions of the male (an obvious and clearly intended curatorial contrast with Baden's Technically intimate series).

Fitzgerald takes an eloquently interrogative stance that is quietly demanding of the viewer. I suspect she does not require definitive response, but rather more active involvement in determining which medium "rules".

Her "measuring the success of a work of art by its resemblance to its subject", a perhaps too literally descriptive title, is as equally eloquent of its conceptual base as Baden's Megan.

Fitzgerald's clear admixture of the photographic and the painterly, however, seems to suggest that each might inform the other and to further suggest, does it really matter? Her sensitively contrived images hold autonomous beauty.

Elly Freer's sox works take as their "entry point" (the artist's words) "the film Picnic at Hanging Rock … to engage with ideas around a woman's place as a guest within the male environment" (also the artist's words).

The six images are characterised by the illustration of a densely populated bush environment aligned with a feeling of mystery and the possibilities of unknown and hidden activity. The "maleness" or otherwise of the sylvan environment escaped me. That said, the rich density of the places depicted with the pictorial interventions (abstract or real) of the artist produced evocative and pictorially rich statements.

Emily Jackett's Myth series is also infused with a sense of the mysterious, even of the softly sinister.

The visual overtones of Pre-Raphaelitism are clearly present and with these, the sort of undeclared eroticism that was part of that movement in both actuality and theory.

Jackett's images are shadowed and shrouded in dark light, a penumbral visual atmosphere that is at once disturbing and sensual. She speaks in her Artist's Statement of "the rewriting of identity through difference and the repetition of memory". I am not sure what this means when confronted with the fragile innocence of her images and the overtly historic references she embraces.

Curator and exhibitor Dean Butters' I'm Not Made of Successful Things series of six images stands physically and tonally separated from the works of the other artists.

His palette is essentially grey and his imagery minimalist, a minimalism that speaks of the purist abstraction of the Romantic Sublime. The six images are barely differentiated and seem to flow into one another around the walls of the back gallery.

However, there is differentiation and this authorial intervention reinforces the "barely there" presentation that produces an overall effect of shimmering but allows each work to announce its individual identity.

The aesthetic combination of "being" and "nothingness" is quietly embracing. Apparently, according once again to the accompanying text, we are also subjected to "a sense of satire being explored, with the use of imagery taken in an extremely poor country, being used to question very privileged western notions of success".

I was taken by the work of each of the artists represented in At a Loss.

Each body of work was visually coherent and opened (to varying degrees of success) its underlying thematic and conceptual base. The connections required some work beyond the aesthetically pleasing, but the results of this were certainly worthwhile.

May I ask that the images and objects in an exhibition be allowed to speak for themselves? I did not need the verbal interventions that told me what I should be looking for.