Down in that cubby hole they call Gallery 2 at Douglas Hyde Gallery, that adjunct contiguity, where small, supplementary art statements go to live or die, you'll find the lights out, except for two, that spot a resin-cast sculpture of a young German Shepherd on guard with its discarded chew toy & open cage. Crowned by a swirl of light & dust, “doggie” has been lobotomised & implanted with a projector. Joining the dots between the electrical cord that mouse's away from doggie's tail & under the gallery wall where a video projection plays Live CCTV & animated vignettes on a short loop, haunted -- now & then -- by excerpts of talk radio & song, I realise the dog's metaphorical brain is the thing that is being thrown from the blindspot nestled behind its ears onto the wall in a splat of staccato splices of life. “Doggie-vision,” down low, oblong & fish eye, is simple -- as you'd expect! It plays out like this: the elephant chew toy (let's call it “Nelly”) is doggie's companion & protagonist in life. When doggie awakes, Nelly is there, always, looking, unblinking, unnerving. Doggie throws Nelly around a bit, the rough & tumble that comes with adolescent dogs & boys. Nelly's stuffed body is still intact -- not yet the tortured transitional object of D Winnicott. Doggie's brain is on a quick cycle as it tumble dries memories of Nelly framed by the dog cage & the white blanket it remembers nuzzling into. Light is sometimes dappled, other times buzzing fluorescent; doggie's surveillance doubles as CCTV. This '90s mixtape of Mike Kelley's “uncanny” & Marc Augé's “non-place” waltzes to normalcy until normalcy becomes abnormal. Doggie's blindspot, evolved into a mind's eye, takes flight from its blanket & out through the cage, a Cartesian catapult from body to mind, dream to dream, to rotate drone-like around a slab of mince meat shaped like a brain plonked on a kitchen chopping board. I lean against the gallery wall, taking in the sights, charged with emotion & memory, remembering times lying in the hot grass looking at the blue sky, holding hands. Small art statements sometimes make the biggest art statements (let's leave it at that!).

Steve Bishop at Douglas Hyde Dublin.