You're organising the Fringe programme for the Dublin Theatre Festival. You decide that maybe a visual arts strand would be a good idea. Who are you going to call? You could do worse than try to track down Mark Garry, an artist who, like some of his peers, became an accidental curator when he found the art world structures weren't really tapping into the activities being pursued by many younger artists. A committed advocate of presenting art outside the hallowed gallery space, earlier this year he organised Ascend, an open-air show of projected art at Ballymun.

In fact he's so concerned about staying outside the loop that he had some doubts about the Fringe project. "I did ask myself whether I was contradicting myself by doing this," he explains. "Particularly when the question of whether to find a corporate sponsor came up. In the end I decided to steer clear of that option." What finally convinced him to become involved, though, "was the opportunity to offer seven people solo shows. In their heart of hearts, I think most artists are lying when they say how delighted they are to be included in a group show. You just don't get the exposure you need. And it is very hard for young artists to get solo shows."

Apart from situating art outside of the usual spaces, Garry's speciality is to cut across boundaries between art categories. For the fringe visual arts project, Gain, he has roped in people who work in a variety of areas, from straightforward painting to graphic design, choreography, music and interactive media. "This is a chance to bring in things from further afield, the kind of thing that doesn't usually get seen."

The work will be dispersed through city centre venues, none of which count as conventional exhibition spaces. "Some of the pieces you'll just sort of stumble on, some of them you will have to make a conscious effort to see." In a way Janice Hough's Pole Position, situated on the third floor of the Fleet Street Car Park, falls into both categories. Utilising an expansive lay-out of Scalextrix track and cars in a disused ballroom, she has generated images exploring the seriousness of play, how ego, competitiveness and aggression are invariably involved in even the most apparently relaxed activities.

You will probably happen upon Christine Ellison's "metaphorical products", which satirise the process of relentless commodification. They take the form of window displays in several shops. A bottle of Inspiration carries the cautionary rider "Can lead to over-achievement" while Answers to the World, suggests that you should only take one per lifetime. It is possible that you will walk right by Louisa Sloan's location signs. She began by musing on the connection between place names and activities. As the uses of places have changed we are left with names indicating occupations no longer found there. But, she thought, imagine place names linked to more prosaic, everyday activities, such as a Skipping Lane along which everyone skipped.

What appealed to Garry about her idea was that she was investing an element of lightness, of fantasy, in the workaday city, making "signs of possibility". Similarly concerned with the fabric of the everyday city, Morleigh Steinberg's film chronicles a remarkable performance by Butoh dancer Oguri, based on the activity of crossing the street, "a daring act of trust between pedestrian and motorist".

Karl Burke, extremely active as a musician as well as a sculptor, is showing a wall-mounted work that is recognisably related to Minimalism. The on-off sequence of his neon installation Twotothred illustrates the perceptual leap from two to three dimensions. It's a purely conceptual piece, advertising an idea, in a sense, in a form and context more usually linked to commercial advertising. Also crossing into the field of advertising, in Smithfield, Laurie Legrand's billboard-mounted digital prints, meditations on personal rather than corporate identities and histories, are derived from photo-booth portraits.

Garry's own work, a 15-minute animated film, Where Failure Leads to Irony, will be projected on to the angled corner of the Civic Offices. He grimaces uneasily when asked what it's about. "It's easy to talk about anyone's work but your own. What it's about, I suppose, is the collapse of the difference between high and low culture. You know, how you can watch anything on TV. It's as valid to watch something bad, it becomes ironic, cultish. Because people have become afraid to say whether something is good or bad . . . oh, God, that doesn't sound good. That doesn't really explain it at all. You'll have to see it."