Taxidermy becomes art

Thanks mainly to its incredibly freaky creatures, The Island Of Dr. Moreau was horrifying in its phantasmagorical portrayal of what can go wrong...with acting! Ooooh, that's right, British stage thespian David Thewlis!!! For a much more kick-ass take on the whole freaky creature thing, check out the art of Enrique Gomez de Molina.Thanks to a taxidermist father who worked for the Miami Museum Of Science, and encouraged his kids to be creative with random animal parts, Enrique creates disturbing/ compelling/ way cool real-animal mashups that evoke either an Avatar-like alternative world, or one where evolution's gone haywire due to human follies -- and lord knows, that musical will drive anyone crazy. Some of his larger recent work includes "Acrobat" (a swooping river otter/bird with a snake-killing stork bill, fighting cock wings, and a pheasant tail), "Mystic" (a sage-looking creature with a beaver body, huge swan feet, a hornbill head, and a Yoda-style walking stick), and "Pandora", an aggressive double-headed swan with a coyote body, deer hooves, a warthog tail, and devil-ish horns from an antelope called a dik-dik, which explains the whole two-heads thing. There're also some smaller works, like "Serpent" (a coiled cobra body with a furious parakeet for a head), "Early Bird" (a Jurassic-looking badboy with a hornbill beak, spiky iguana head, and a water hen body, which's killing a little bird in a stream bed), and a baby emu/ spotted skunk hybrid that seems cute until you realize it's got evil eyes and it's doing a hand stand so it can spray you, called "Look At Me" -- it's really a musk-see.Unveiled at this year's Scope Art Show will be his biggest work to date, "Rhinoplasty", which involves iridescent purple/green scales (actually the wings of the Java Beetle glued on one-by-one) on a life-sized replica head of an endangered rhino, also a tidy description of Val Kilmer and his career these days.