At the entrance to Cade Roster's gallery space in The Contemporary Museum Biennial of Hawaii Artists (VIII) exhibition, his name sits formally centered in black sans-serif lettering. Below, on the bottom corner of the entrance wall, three 4-inch-high figures hand-drawn in graphite enthusiastically wave visitors into the space and into Roster's highly imagined world, where the fantastic and frightening live on equal planes.

It's a detail easily missed, and yet it sets the tone for Roster's work. It's this interaction with space — even something this insignificant — that makes site-specific installation rewarding. Site-specific installation may already be a concept clearly in the canon, but in Hawai'i, venues for such work are not common.

Curator Inger Tully, who makes her Biennial debut with this show, says she was looking for work that was "visually compelling, and also work that had a deeper meaning, something that was a little thought-provoking. ... But I was also looking for artists who were pushing themselves in terms of installation work, because this is one of the only opportunities that artists have to work like that in Hawai'i, in terms of space."

The artists, chosen by Tully, were given roughly nine months to complete a body of work for a specific space. In addition to Roster, artists selected include O'ahu's Eli Baxter and Yida Wang, Hawai'i's Meidor Hu, Kaua'i's Wayne Zebzda and Maui's Vincent Goudreau and Javier Martinez.

"All the artists in this exhibition are completely multifaceted," Tully says. "They move from 3-D to 2-D, and all of them have their ideas and look for the perfect media to get across their ideas."

Recycled objects, cast sculpture, photography, video, multiples, drawing and painting are all represented. In Roster's case, sewing skills, too.

Roster's "Plush Seriescont" lines one wall — cast mixed-media sculptures work as a template for his ideas. The bearlike images that evoke children's bedtime stories come to life, while the facing wall of graphic images reference to anime and manga.

Exiting the gallery, Roster created "Shipwrecked: Holliday and Zeeb," where the visitor stands within the work itself — between a wall-length graphite illustration and the museum's Japanese garden. Holliday and Zeeb, two recurring characters in his work, face the visitor in three dimensions, fully clothed and armed.

Baxter, too, makes the most of her space, hanging two large-scale works from the high ceiling, so they are on view on the first and second levels. The all-black objects, made from recycled bicycle inner tubes and accouterments, look like something created by a dark Dr. Seuss. They simultaneously look menacing and playful, referencing our consumption — its futuristic gloom and also its created beauty. More than a cursory nod to process, the work, which is polished to a fine finish, evokes images of botanicals in a post-apocalyptic world.

Wang's work, which opens the show, shows her tremendous range. She is known for her drawing and painting, but it is her sculptures that stand out here. Ideas of displacement and identity come together in myriad ways.

Wang, who has exhibited internationally, dwells on the particulars while bringing out the universal. "Infiltrating-Propagating II" deals with a friend's diagnosis of breast cancer. Latex breasts are suspended above latex-layered Plexiglas color scans from medical books. Mirrors at the bottom add depth to the piece, but also reference the clinical experience of the hospital and the personal experience of the body.

"When you first see this piece, it's just so beautiful," Tully says. "But when you hear more about it, and about the materials, it brings up whole other layers of meaning. So I think each piece has a little story behind it, if people want to take the time to discover what those issues are, and have a dialogue about something that was occurring in people's lives."

Sue Kiyabu is a freelance writer living in Honolulu.