in Chinatown. Elisabeth Higgins O’Connor doesn’t lend such allusion to her works, preferring to call her larger-than-human, dog-headed anthropomorphs “No Names,” but she does so knowing that the sculptures themselves are richly allusive. Playful, and even daring to be cute in a way that disarms viewers but in instances disarms the work, O’Connor’s horde calls to mind Disney’s perpetual promise of “dreams come true,” as well as Mary Shelley’s words describing the dream that inspired her to write Frankenstein.

“Frightful must it be,” she wrote, “for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.” There’s no shortage of Frankensteinian endeavor here, as O’Connor stitches, stuffs, binds and ratchets into form her characters from scrap fabric, upholstery and padding over makeshift armatures. There’s also a lot of humor, as when, suggesting