3/07/10 4:04 PM

A plastic boy flies through the air on toy pterodactyls while a man with a bird-skull head looks through a porthole and naked black-eyed dolls levitate against a forested land. It’s a fantastically macabre world that Scott Galloway has created through layers of digital montage, but one that in all but a few images is not fleshy enough, not palpable enough, to fully constitute a world of its own. The best of these possess a charm — and possession, as in the soul being taken over by another being, is apropos here — that recalls the invented worlds of fantasy writer Neil Gaiman and animator Jan Svankmeyer, where coyness winks at terror and the grotesque, making them serious playthings for readers and viewers. The more accomplished of Galloway’s pictures do this too — in fact, the imp in Dark Impulse does it quite literally, eyebrows raised over a button nose, curved hat pointing up above gleaming red eyes. If the little devil weren’t so creepily green, and if he weren’t holding a mysteriously bubbly weapon, you might just want to take him home. That’s the trick of the truly evil…

—Lori Waxman