!ND!V!DUALS Bring It All Back Home

Since 2006 the !ND!V!DUALS collective has been creating sculptures for the post-modern age and displaying their work around the country. But on Saturday, the group put on its first show in Boston, opening their "Lovesick Cafe" gallery at Allston's Orchard Skate Shop.

According to its blog, the group uses salvaged materials and screen-printed wood to create "site-specific installations typically inhabited or characterized by surreal and bizarre creatures." Furthermore, the group's scultures "exhibit innovative gestures and witty formal inventions combined with detailed craftsmanship that showcases humor, playfulness and savagery."

The artists involved have varied since it began, but the mainstays include former students Dominic Casserly, Andrew Meers and Luke O'Sullivan.

Casserly and Meers attended Massachusetts College of Art and Design after high school, while O'Sullivan earned his master of fine arts degree from Rhode Island School of Design.

For this installment, however, Meers took a backseat and wasn’t directly involved with crafting. The two non-Hollistonians working the sculptures were Winston MacDonald and Colin Driesch, another original member.

“We’ve always worked with scraps and found wood and we come up with an idea and we run with it,” Casserly explained. “In 2006, we were asked to build whatever we wanted and that’s how it evolved.”

The man who found a shining light in their talent and gave them an invite to feature their work at the Bonnaroo music festival is John Bisby.

“I gave them an opportunity about seven years ago at Bonnaroo music festival," said Bisby. "We decided that their attitude was hot enough to separate from the others at the human zoo and their job was to make animals. It was apparent in half a day that they work as one organism with three-quarters a brain and it seems like 35 hands. They realize these scenarios through the detritus of the everyday."

“This is our first show in Boston," Driesch said. "That’s what we’re most excited about. We try to get our friends out there. We try to get some momentum, get some fanbase behind us. It’s good what we’re doing, being local artists and supporting the local scene.”

After doing the first set of sculptures in Maine and traveling with them around the East Coast to New York City, this exhibit is the current feature at the art gallery above the skate shop at 156 Harvard Ave. The !ND!V!DUALS' art will be on diplay at the gallery (open Monday—Saturday, 12-9 p.m. and Sunday, 12-7 p.m.) until April 3.

“We try to do art shows once a month. This is the first since early November," said Armin Bachman, co-owner of Orchard. "The commissions from the art sales go to the extension charity we founded to make skating more accessible in the city. A show like this isn’t as much a sales-based show but more a show to support these guys."

During the show, skaters shredded the half-pipe in the skate shop while a crowd of hundreds piled in to check out the art. With soda, wine, and beer available, people took in the creative creature scenes with wonder and glee.

In the past, their sets featured enormous sculptues and conceptual entities, borrowing features as varied as personified dinosaurs, monsters, and cartoons, which sometimes stood more than 10 feet tall. This time, they settled for a more refined and humble approach.

These smaller statues were conical in shape with leaf-like protrusions flailing off, four limbs and dynamic poses sprouting around intricately-decorated settings. Interior designs like lamps and sconces, kitchens, place-set tables and bathrooms, made the show a delightful walk-through. The crowd took it in, chewing over the stunning surrealism.

“The portrayal of a kitchen, how fluorescent it is, the nitty-gritty of the kitchen, I love it. And they even have a hand sanitizer up there, all the detail, it’s amazing,” a viewer said.

“I think it’s important to let people have fun looking at art and I think that’s one of our strengths, making it playful and approachable,” O’Sullivan said.

“It’s like a bunch of different worlds coming together," said Broderick Gumpright, the other co-owner of Orchard. "Skating is its own thing but it’s always been influenced by art, a very graphic thing. It’s a good community.”

And so it goes, art, skating, individuals and fun, all in an ensemble effort to explore new bounds and possibilities.