Michele Basta's hybrid creatures at Coup are fantastical by any measure. A mix of hallucinatory surrealism and a side show take on mythology, her humanoid beasts are paradoxical in so many ways that it is almost as if their mannequin-like appendages and oddly mammalian features were products of an alternate reality where bizarre incongruities are par for the course. How else to explain FROM WHAT I REMEMBER/ METAMORPHOSIS, right, a cat-headed female in a tattered hoop skirt and long black gloves. With her lynx-like head thrown back as she appears to exhale a huge plume of crimson paper flames, she dominates her corner of the gallery while posing no end of enigmatic possibilities for which there are no immediate answers. A related work, SPHINX, top, in a nearby alcove, inverts the equation with the body of a lioness and human upper torso topped with a demonic hybrid head. Instead of arms, she sprouts wings made up of hundreds of pages of poems in an extravagant new take on the term “literary lion”
"AND THE EARTH BEGOT..." Mixed Media Sculpture by Michele Basta, Through Oct. 8, Coup d'Oeil Art Consortium, 2033 Magazine St., 722-0876; www.coupdoeilartconsortium.com