You seem to see them at every garage sale: a chipped and battered, faux-ornate, gold-colored frame containing a bland and boring landscape that only holds meaning for the original painter and perhaps its first owner. Others, however, see the same thing as a blank canvas of artistic opportunity, like Steven Leduc‘s contribution of a giant kraken to the calm tides of a sea scene found on the side of a street.

Or take Chris McMahon, who finds the most pastoral pastels and mundane scenes he can …then adds monsters to their midst, breathing new life into landscapes otherwise destined to gather dust or be discarded entirely.

Driscoll Reid of Portland, Oregon, in another form of more-abstract monster mashup, turns a large canyon small with disturbingly friendly-yet-dark giants. They step ominously through a tacky old forest and straddle the dull waterway in which they are reflected.