The fifth biennial outdoor sculpture exhibition at Evergreen Museum is an opportunity to look more closely at this 19th-century mansion and its 26 acres of lawn and woods in north Baltimore.

These site-specific sculptures establish eye-opening juxtapositions between new artwork and an old estate.

Several sculptures sited on the front lawn make the most of such juxtapositions. Mike Womack's "Shooting Electrons" consists of the skeletal metal frame for a tilted white steel cube. This electric light-covered armature essentially is a see-through sculpture, so you look through it and toward the mansion up on the hill.

If that cube stands out against the lawn, Rebecca Herman and Mark Shoffner's "Animal Shrine" is a more natural intervention. Lightly constructed of wood and slender willow branches, it's a see-through structure that quietly occupies another section of the front lawn.

Qualifying as another sort of natural architecture are J. Hill's "Hideouts." These are two Sioux tipi handcrafted by the artist and residents of Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Looking past these front lawn-sited Indian tipi and toward the elegant Italianate mansion, you'll wonder where in the world you are.

Other sculptors place their work against the mansion itself. Sharon Engelstein's "Green Golly" is an inflated fabric balloon whose bulbous projections would be pretty weird even if this whatever-it-is piece weren't sited between the looming Corinthian columns at the top of the mansion's front steps.

More polite is Wee Lit Tan's "Ephemerally Everchanging Evergreen," a small lattice made of luminescent acrylic strips covering a portion of a window and wall of the mansion's adjacent carriage house.

Proceeding to the lawn behind the mansion, you'll notice that, well, there isn't too much out there. If the front makes a splashy impression, the back would benefit from having a few large pieces. However, there are some noteworthy sculptures back there.

Michele Kong's "Sky Glow" consists of three shiny metal tape-constructed bridges crossing a stream. These are lattice-engineered allusions to bridges rather than something you would actually cross, so that see-through aspect encourages you to look through the bridges and at the water below.

Most of the sculptures in this outdoor exhibition understandably prompt you to reconsider panoramic views, but Brian Balderston has a sly installation beside the same stream in which he denies you much of a view.

Balderston's "Memorial to an Ambitious Idea (Remnants of the Solar Cell)" is a nondescript little plywood shed whose open front door is an invitation to enter and sit on a white lounge chair. From that inside perch, you'll feel like the black-painted interior walls are rather claustrophobic. Although you obviously can look through the narrow doorway, you only see a sliver of lawn, trees and stream. Exiting this chamber has a liberating effect.

Nearly all of the sculptures are easily spotted on the grounds, but you'll have to take a walk in the woods to see Adam Frelin's "Lighthouse, Beheaded," a mixed medium construction in which a red-and-white lighthouse base and its decapitated, functioning beacon incongruously rest on the forest floor. Have you found your way or lost your way when you come upon this lighthouse amidst the trees?

Although the site-specific installations make clever use of the back of the property, its large expanse of meadow really needs one or two more pieces. As it is, the most imposing natural intervention back there is an enormous tree that recently fell onto the rain-soaked lawn. An act of God steals the show.

"Sculpture at Evergreen 2008" remains through Sept. 28 at Evergreen Museum & Library, at 4545 N. Charles St., in Baltimore. Call 410-516-0341 or go to www.museums.jhu.edu.

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