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Museum And Gallery

Animal collective

A SEAT AT THE TABLE: The bar scene, by !nd!v!duals.

!nd!v!duals (a group comprised of Dom, Meers, Col!n, and Luke O) has overrun Brunswick’s Coleman Burke Gallery with an impressive display of giant beasts toting weapons (or other anthropomorphizing accessories) fashioned from salvaged materials. The results reveal deep attention to detail and, most importantly, a humorous collective approach. You can’t help but enjoy this show, because these guys obviously enjoyed bringing it to you. The Portland Phoenix sat down with three of the members (sadly, Luke O was on safari) to find more about what’s behind their unique brand of irreverence.

WHAT’S THE DICTIONARY DEFINITION OF !ND!V!DUALS?
MEERS A delicious blend of artistic flavors!
COL!N A collective of artists birthed from God’s manly fists!
DOM “There is no I in !nd!v!duals” — that is the whole point of the exclamations. We are a group that works well together but we also work well as individuals.

WHICH PIECES REFLECT THAT ATTITUDE BEST?
C I really love the Indian robot. A wooden robot in the midst of battle with his arm cocked back wielding a tomahawk, while the other arm boasts a semi-automatic bow firing at a turtle rapelling from the celling. We really wanted to put some interesting details into this one so we created different-sized and -colored cogs at different depths in the body, arms, and head.
D For me it was the bar scene. We decided to each build our own animal heads without help from others (which is not our norm). I built a crocodile which was totally my own, but as we all put them together at the bar scene, the piece really became whole, where you can see everyone’s separate voices and working style.
M Luke and I did the monkey screwing the donkey...

HOW DID YOU FIND MATERIALS AND PUT THEM TOGETHER?
C Well, we knew going into this that everything would be constructed from found wood; we just didn’t know how or where we would find it. I think it was Kyle Downs who told us about a massive wood pile at the town dump. A more beautiful sight, I cannot recall. It was the jackpot of wood piles, the kind any parent would take a bullet to keep their kids from climbing. With John Bisbee's financial help we rented a U-Haul. We tried to pull pieces based on condition, uniqueness, and color. There was a lot of rotten wood. Our haul consisted of doors, fence posts, windows, stairs, chairs, walls, plywood, framing for houses... We filled the truck two and a half time times and unloaded all found materials into the gallery space and organized the pieces by size and shape.
D People from Maine who come to our show are looking at junk they threw out. Our only expense was screws.