When you feel bad for the creature from the black lagoon, you know shit’s goin’ down. With a yellow duck inflatable float around its waist, the B-movie creature is surrounded by an oil slick and discarded plastic bottles in Laura and Gary Dumm’s pop-art portrayal of what lurks ahead if we don’t become more environmentally conscious. “Gary’s very political,” Laura says. “I’m always one who likes to think we can make the world better.” The couple fuses a brightly colored, surrealist style with classic movie monsters such as Frankenstein and Audrey II, the Venus’ flytrap from Little Shop of Horrors, as the misbegotten byproducts of scientific experimentation. Gary, an illustrator and cartoonist, drew the initial sketches. With input from Laura, a painter, he tweaked the designs to make them easier to blow up to 3-feet square and paint in Laura’s vibrant style. “We’re both children of the ‘60s,” she says, “So we’re kind of like that anyway.”
Oct. 7-25, BayArts, bayarts.net
