Depicting such fantastical subjects as dinosaurs and even stranger hybrid creatures, as well as spaceship-like objects, the rather naive-looking paintings in Verne Dawson’s exhibition “Mermaid Money” at first seemed merely trite and self-indulgent. The exhibition’s title, however, hinted at what many of these works really are: searing commentaries on American consumer culture and its effects. One of the largest paintings in the show, Winsor McCay (all works cited, 2015) set the ball rolling. McCay, in case you’ve forgotten, was a cartoonist and animator whose images appealed to millions. His

Back in art school, Claudia Comte’s classmates called her la tronçonneuse, Miss Chainsaw. She hates the nickname, but there’s no question that she’s a virtuoso of the rip and call of the saw. There’s a tension between this more or less brutal tool and the extraordinary craft demonstrated in her work. For her most recent solo show, “Sonic Geometry,” she installed nine sculptures from the series “Giant Bones,” 2015: animal bones scaled up to dinosaur scope in polished olive wood, sitting on (or in) black wooden cubes. All had been cut freehand with chain saws before being sanded down, revealing