THE latest Douglas Hyde exhibition, Outside, sees the gallery leaving its usual diving pool space, and commissioning artists to make site specific works for locations around the TCD campus. According to some accompanying notes, the resulting artworks "question assumed notions about our surroundings" but some of the pieces that have appeared around the college, thwart this attempt to impose unity on the event, fitting uncomfortably under the Outside umbrella. Such waywardness, and its attendant broadening of the possibilities of the show are, however, almost certainly good things.
Perhaps the most strikingly jump of the curatorial rails comes in the form of Mary McIntyre's contribution, which can be found - with some difficulty among the warrens of mysterious campus businesses - indoors, on a top floor wall of the college's Biotechnology Department, positioned, it might seem, where it is least likely to encounter casual passers by McIntyre's heartily ironic light boxes feature the interior of a church, apparently in a state of disrepair, in which the only congregation is a number of religious statues, hanging around gloomily, perhaps bemoaning the loss of their former exalted position in biotechnology.
For her quick, sharp and funny work, Caroline McCarthy has attached a series of toy arrows to the cold blocks of the exterior wall of the Arts building, as though the structure was the besieged fortress of a gang of short pants cowboys, rather than a forum for intellectual investigation.
Where McCarthy's work characterises the college walls as an unbreachable obstruction, Garrett (formerly "Gary") Phelan's Periphery has little trouble passing through them. Delivered through the boundary breaching medium of radio, broadcast from the campus railings, Phelan's bulletins - a discussion on Plato's cave dwellers, a passage on creating boundary fences and a message in Latin - nevertheless focus on the business of exclusion and exclusivity.
Theo Simms's work uses a set of overhead projectors - vital cogs in the academic motor - to cover the end wall of the Museum Building with images that may represent what might be found on the other side of the stone, but as the projectors are propped up on a torrent of romantic paperbacks, the images may be fanciful.
Morgan Doyle's work occupies a prominent space in front square, masquerading as a site of some repairs, bearing a bold warning sign that serves to lure viewers closer, only to disappoint them with its innocuousness, while Finbar Kelly's work, which apparently involves the random placement of college refuse sacks, is not only the hardest work to spot, it is also, by design, a load of rubbish.
