There's a monster in the closet at Howard House. Projected in the gallery's scruffy back-back room, a driverless, chained-up motorcycle bucks and jerks ferociously, left to its strange fate in an otherwise abandoned industrial loft.

Austrian artist Hubert Dobler's video delivers everything great sculpture has to offer, medium be damned: a passionate use of materials, an arresting occupation of space, a physicality that, however intense, can dematerialize before one's eyes. Banished from the heart of Billy Howard's gleaming New Sculpture Survey, Dobler's Bull (2005) plays a perfect id to this sometimes tame selection of recent work from Diem Chau, Ben Chickadel, Erik Geschke, Jon Haddock, Jenny Heishman, Sean Johnson, Michael O'Malley, and Jason Wood.

Heishman sets a high standard with assemblages such as the slumped glass and Styrofoam Pssst! (2005). More or less representing two bunnies in a moment of distraction, Pssst! could probably have coasted on sophisticated wackiness alone. But Heishman took it further, collapsing time and blunting information as if conjuring a dream event. The rewarding outcome feels intensely private, an image flashed from the artist's mind to ours, no explanation given or required.

Sean Johnson imbues the technical bravado of cantilever with personal significance in Absence (2006) and Scaling a Façade (2006). Subjective too, but allegorically so, his work contrasts well with Heishman's, even if the former piece—a two-legged dining table balancing a suitcase and a place setting—teeters on the brink of heavy-handedness.

The show goes on, encompassing Wood's slavish effigies in pencils and pick-up sticks, Haddock's cartoon violence, Chau's minutely carved crayons, and Chickadel's cut paper. There is figuration, decoration, color, volume, line, transparency. New Sculpture Survey makes a good case for the polymorph condition of contemporary sculpture, but doesn't do much to find a message therein. Don't forget to ask to see the bike.