Mutant animals: they're everywhere. A new hit computer game, entitled "Spore," invites players to create their own species, guiding them from cellular organisms through various 'tweener phases of creaturehood, as they ascend the evolutionary ladder. Players get to shape their animals to their liking: adding diverse sensory organs, claws, hands, mouths, beaks: like a Mr. Potato Head for biologists. On cable TV, one sees ads for National Geographic specials using computer animation to depict how turkeys descended from raptors and whales once had feet.

Such portrayals make a fitting present for Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday fell
on February 12 of this year. To look at Darwin's careful sketches of Galapagos finches, portrayed in profile, each diverging from its cousins in slight, telling ways--the shape and slant of the beak, the position of the eye--is to gaze at a family tree of our own scientific ancestors; in their prim propriety, they speak (warble?) to us of an earlier era, in which our understanding of the natural world was more formal and incomplete. Yet it's worth noting that in the natural world, at least in Darwin's model of it, variety--mutation--is not a bad thing. Indeed it is the central pivot of the evolutionary mechanism that, along with mating, allows species to improve their lot in relation to their fellow species and their ecosystem, and allows them to adapt.

In ancient civilizations, hybrid animals, such as the hydra or griffin, often raised their garbled heads as mythological figures. Yet modern images of mutant creatures have often taken on a fearful aspect. From P.T. Barnum's "Fiji Mermaid" to the two-headed snakes and livestock paraded before us in Ripley's Believe It Or Not, mutant animals have been presented to us as freaks of nature, to inspire both wonder and dread. In recent decades, with more advanced understanding of genetics and the myriad effects of pollution, chemical waste and atomic radiation--and if that's not enough, global warming--on the natural world, mutant animals have come to represent something still more frightening: humanity's ability to wreak devastation on its kindred species and our shared environment, down to its genetic building blocks. And with the advent of cloning, Dolly the Sheep lends a benign ovine face to the existential Twilight Zone drama that is technology's ability to mass-produce living beings like Xeroxed pages from a corporate report.

Thus it is no surprise that contemporary artists would adopt mutant or hybrid animals as mascots of a sort, to address a wide range of subjects, starting with man's conflicted relationship to nature. One can't help but be struck by the sheer range of artwork featuring such misfit organisms. From paintings that reference--and satirize--staid genres from art history to work that emulates fantastical or lowbrow tropes, young artists are employing mutant animals as unwitting spokescreatures for their own projected observations of society, nature, and the world around them: a world that has come to seem increasingly off-kilter. A number of unrelated West Coast group shows highlight this improbable trend, among them "Tales From An Imaginary Menagerie," on view at the Palo Alto Art Center through April 26, and "Natural Blunders" at the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University, which runs through March 20. A recent group show at San Francisco's 111 Minna Gallery titled, "Freak of Nature," featured a range of artists veering from campy and illustrative to psychedelic and surreal: unlike "Nature Freak," a group show at the Kirkland Art Center, in Kirkland, Washington, which could be seen last fall, or "(un)Natural," which features eight Bay Area artists and runs through June 13, 2009 at di Rosa Preserve in Napa Valley.

That such shows should vary so widely attests to the spectrum of genres, guises and purposes that animals have been allotted by the current generation of artists. Whether examining genetic modification or the commodification of the environment, whether investigating the unintended consequences of technology or the subtle power struggles implicit in interpersonal relationships, we can always set forth animals to make our case for us, calling them to the stand like so many injured furred-or-feathered witnesses for the prosecution. That these creatures don't always understand their own malformity or plight only makes their tales more arresting, their situation all the more poignant. In some cases, these hybrids seem perfectly at ease with their eccentric anatomy. Often, however, their defects or dislocations do not seem to their benefit; rather these alterations seem detrimental, capricious, parasitic, imposed on them, or just plain wrong. In their disfigurement or displacement, these creatures do not seem like happy travelers on the Darwinian flow chart toward biological adaptation and collective self-betterment; rather they seem to be the result of a more malignant, distinctly unnatural selection.

While fully cognizant of Darwin's legacy (as well as that of Audubon, Oppenheimer, Freud and David Lynch, for that matter) today's hybrid portraitists seem likewise well aware of Barnum, and the theatricality, humor, and pathos their subjects' unnatural beauty inspires. We marvel at them doubly, standing in awe at their wondrous natural design, even as we stand aghast at their even more unlikely, unnatural aspects. Step right up and see the four-headed goose!

In fact, to see a four-headed goose, one need go no further than the work of Justin Gibbens, a young painter based in central Washington who has shown throughout the Northwest, including G. Gibson Gallery in Seattle and Elizabeth Leach in Portland. Trained both in scientific illustration and in Chinese painting, Gibbens create lushly seductive animal portraits, using watercolor, graphite, gouache and acrylic on tea- or coffee-stained paper. Like New York-based painter Walton Ford, whose sumptuous, often dazzling paintings consciously emulate the style of famed 19th Century naturalist John James Audubon, Gibbens' work overtly cites Audubon as a precedent. But unlike Ford, who cleaves more closely to fact, while posing his beasts in staged scenarios featuring implicit violence and/or humor, Gibbens delves directly into the realm of fiction. Some depict fantastical or pseudo-mythological creatures: a half-lion half-eagle griffin, a horned owl with antlers, a surprisingly functional melding of an aquatic sea-monster and a grebe. The recent series shows birds with multiple heads. This polycephalitic aviary includes hawks, spoonbills, blue jays, herons, and that four-headed Canada goose, which rendered via Gibbens' deliberately antiquated verisimilitude, takes on a surprisingly believable aspect. One recent picture echoes a famous image of a flamingo by Audubon; in Gibbens' version, the bird's snaky neck wraps around one of its legs, an oddity just plausible enough you almost buy it.

Audubon's legacy is complex; though his name now stands for eco-activism and nature calendars, Audubon killed his avian models prior to posing and immortalizing them. That several of the 497 species from his monumental volume "Birds of America"-- from the Carolina Parakeet to the Great Auk-- are now extinct only makes his project more admirable. Yet because of humanity, these birds have sadly migrated from fact to phantom, a distinction that lends painful resonance to the deliberate blending of fact and fiction in these contemporary artists' work.

Merging keen factual observation with the heightened realm of fiction, painter Tiffany Bozic brings impressive skill to bear on her lovingly rendered animal tales. Based in San Francisco but raised in Arkansas, Bozic was a resident artist at the California Academy of Sciences in 2006-2007. Her images, painted in acrylic on maple panel, feature the sort of brilliant colors and elegant dramatic compositions that suggest illustrations from a book of children's fables from a century ago (her solo show last spring at Kinsey/Desforges in Culver City was called "Bedtime Stories"). One painting depicts a mother vulture shielding a brood of piglets while its chicks feed on the dead mother pig below. Other works depict birds engaged in courtship rituals, mating octopi, or sea creatures such as starfish, crabs, or sea urchins engaged in epic battles. Despite its unblinking depiction of predation, death, and parasitism, Bozic's work also invokes rituals of animal romance and rearing young; augmenting factual accuracy with internal nuance, her depictions of obscure animal realms bear odd parallels to human society. With their implied delineations of animal morality, her works read as cautionary fables that animals might tell each other before tucking each other in, or, at their grandest, murals for their public buildings.

More deliberately fictive, the elegant drawings of Adonna Khare posit dreamlike scenarios in which mutant animals dangle from swings and carry entire cities on their backs. Ranging from small, precise works on paper to 30-foot long installations, as in her 2008 show at Santa Monica's Lora Schlesinger Gallery, her works play freely with scale, casually grafting together animals and people, as in the anthropomorphic beasts with lions' heads and human limbs. More rooted in the arena of fantasy than that of science, Khare's emotionally charged narratives portray her hybrids as complex theatrical characters, suggesting "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for animal mutants.

Tara Tucker, based in San Francisco, also crafts meticulously rendered drawings of animals interacting with each other with rich emotional complexity. However, the hybridization in Tucker's work apparently derives from cross-species interbreeding, as if these species have merged to adapt to rapidly shifting circumstances. In some of her works, the animals have even fused with vegetation: sprouting mushrooms, flowers, stalks or roots from their shaggy pelts, her birds and animals are oddly at ease in their new guise, like peculiar hybrids from a brave new near-future world in which their survival depends on finding new modes of adaption.

Featured in both "Imaginary Menagerie" and "Natural Blunders," Misako Inaoka also crafts animal hybrids, though her language derives more from wind-up toys than scientific verisimilitude. Born in Japan and based in San Francisco, Inaoka creates small mechanical birds and critters from what looks like die-cast plastic and resin. Powered by hidden motion detectors, her birds often chirp or twitter when viewers approach: an effect at once engaging and off-putting. These droll hybrids do not aspire to biological veracity, as with the bird with an extra head in place of its tail, or the two-headed pig which sprouts a sprig of leaves from one forehead and sits perched atop a pair of bird legs. Rather their unlikely forms suggest artificial Frankenstein-type experiments, or the grotesque lengths to which animals might evolve to ensure survival. Their Darwinian subtext is no accident: her 2007 show at Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco was called "Origin of Species" in homage to Darwin's seminal manuscript. In recent works, her birds sprout elaborate clusters of berries or vegetation from their heads, covering their faces: a strangely maladaptive design that looks more suited to a surrealist ladies' hat than a viable response to the natural environment.

The ceramic sculptures of Reno-based Rebekah Bogard also resemble toys, or the cutesy world of Japanese anime. Seen this winter in two separate LA solo shows--at Sam Lee Gallery and the Vincent Prince Art Museum at East LA College--Bogard's work features a menagerie of mutant beasties, resembling baby squirrels with long lizard-like tails or antlers, that despite their adorability almost resemble larvae. At first glance, the scenarios she posits for them seem sweetly affectionate, but their interactions are often steeped in melancholy or sexuality; their emotional vulnerability reads as an allegory for human interaction, particularly as it relates to gender roles.

LA painter Samantha Fields also conjures animals whose superficial innocence belies a subtext of adult truths. Although Fields has since moved on to more realistic depictions of natural catastrophe, her work from 2004-06 portrays cartoony big-eyed animals in electric colors, often perched in tree branches and sporting odd deformities, such as bubbling cysts or weird prong-like growths. With such coy titles as "Bubbles" the tree cat eyes visitors warily and The angry young rodent is comforted, her work melds a goofy Animal Planet-type voice with an aura of menace, suggesting an upbeat documentary on mutated baby animals coping with some untold disaster.

Painter John Valadez comes out of the Los Angeles Chicano muralist tradition; his works generally portray the day-to-day verities of Latino life, from hanging out at storefronts to relaxing at the beach. The genre took a mythological turn in his 2008 show at Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, in which Valadez showed Latino beachgoers frolicking amidst fantastical sea creatures such as giant sea serpents or toothy, gaping whales. Whatever their origin--be it ecological disaster or evolution--Valadez' sea beasts serve as potent embodiments of the unknown.

Hannah Stouffer, seen lately in 111 Minna's "Freak of Nature" show, and in a solo show at a small storefront gallery on Western Ave. in LA, is an illustrator and designer as much as an artist. Her omnivorous work gobbles up references, from vintage design to color field painting and the Pattern and Decoration movement, to such lowbrow mass artforms as cartoons, surfboat art, silkscreens or tattoos. Her imagery suggests items from a punk natural history giftshop: animal skeletons prance alongside tails from giant lizards and hawks bedecked in falconry garb; in numerous works, toothy mammal skulls, of horned goats or prehistoric cats, grin from the trunks of the looping pythons, who wrap around each other, among skeletal beasts or reclining nudes. Stouffer's designs, which she has also applied to a line of t-shirts, present mutant animals as a subcultural icon: the sort of trophy you'd ink into your biceps or affix to the grill of your truck.

LA artist Joshua Levine creates trophies of more visceral sort. His sculptured mutant animal heads, as seen last summer in the group show "RIPE" at d.e.n. contemporary in Culver City, resemble the sort of wall trophies that might line a futuristic hunting lodge. They range from the long-necked, two-headed doe joined at its ears, to a dashing golden deer with five ears, whose two matching heads are conjoined by a shared third eye. One exceptionally disturbing creature is the two-headed dark grey antelope whose butting foreheads merge in a festering bloom of lifelike, querying glass eyes. Unsettling on a number of levels, these works suggest that as unnatural at these beasts are, they're good enough to be killed and set out on display by human sportsmen.

Fueled by a simmering sense of outrage infused by a wry sense of humor, Oakland-based, Tacoma-born artist Josh Keyes is deeply attuned to the plight of animals in
a human-dominated world. Although not technically hybrids, Keyes' animals exist in a distinctly hybridized world; their own ecosystems apparently eroded, they appear stranded in the manmade landscape, amid human detritus or abandoned statuary. At once poignant and absurd, Keyes' studious drawings and paintings depict animals isolated dramatically amid fragmentary slices of land or water. Seemingly lost and bewildered in their dreamlike stage sets, they look like protagonists in some existential drama on global warming written by that popular writing team of Samuel Beckett and Al Gore. In images such as the grizzly bear standing in water next to an octopus, holding a raccoon, Keyes asks where these creatures might go once humanity has fully usurped their natural environment. Faced with a challenge to adapt-or-die, one also wonders what they will become if they survive their radically displaced environments. Previously seen in Los Angeles at George Billis Gallery, Keyes' newest work comes to David B. Smith Gallery in Denver this spring.

Chicago painter Laurie Hogin wields her brushes, and knowledge of art history, with unerring skill to interrogate the long-standing, highly loaded relationship between humanity and the animal world. Intended as social critique, her work alludes to specific genres of European painting, particularly 17th Century Dutch still life, with its tendency to fetishize objects from nature as exotic trophies to be possessed and presented as aestheticized commodities. However, Hogin's trophy animals do not sit still for their masters, but rather openly express their fury and contempt: her world is peopled by snarling bunnies (who often bear the telltale patterning of tigers or other wild cats), angry dogs, bleating deer, irate chickens, even outraged sheep. In recent years (as seen on the West Coast at Koplin Del Rio Gallery in Culver City), Hogin's colors have grown ever more dazzling and artificial. Proffering albino white or electric-red alligators, brilliant green ducks, mottled fuchsia lizards, and candy-colored bunnies, amidst the usual suspects of growling furred beasts, her psychedelic group portraits now feel more like something out of 1969 San Francisco than 1600s Antwerp. The artificiality of her palette is especially potent in her recent solo monkey portraits: their fur dappled toxic pink, sticky lemon-lime, or grape punch purple, posed beside human skulls to mimic vanitas paintings, they sit grimacing or grinning smugly, like a set of toy trolls. Echoing the "embarrassment of riches" of 17th Century Dutch mercantile culture, Hogin's bestiaries pose pointed analogies to our own culture of insatiable consumerism, and our own dominion over the animal world. Looking as if they have been posed, and bred, to serve as vulgar aesthetic commodities, her untamed animals still snarl at their fate, unwilling players in the subservient role humanity has allotted them.

Hogin's pissed-off animals are the angry id, the raging Lear, the mocking jesters, of the mutant world. Though mute, their expressions speak on behalf of a captive, yet-undocile nature; next time you step up to see the mutant animals, they may be staring back. They won't be happy.

home page image: "Twelve Moments of Saturday Morning TV - The Colonization of My Child's Mind (Green with Stripe) (detail) 2006 Laurie Hogin Oil on Panel with Artist Made Frames 9.25 x 8.25 inches Courtesy of Koplin Del Rio, Los Angeles