Crablike creatures — menacing, yet oddly endearing — scuttle across a devastated wasteland, clicking their prehensile wire pincers and waving their television aerial antennae.

Plastic-bodied pterodactyls with goose-necked desk lamp heads and wings of wooden slats streak across the ceiling in startled flight. Three-dimensional landscapes — evoking vast industrial complexes seen from an airplane window — of motherboards and computer innards are stitched together with leather and suede to make giant uncozy quilts.

These scenes are not the dystopian vision of a science-fiction writer or a filmmaker, but the unique creation of Eric Celarier, the artist featured in this month’s dual exhibit at the Greenbelt Community Center Art Gallery.

This intriguing exhibit opened last weekend, during the Festival of Lights — a celebration of the handmade and the homegrown. Holiday shoppers flocked to it, pondering purchases of artisan-made gifts, many fashioned with pliable and inviting organic or recycled fibers. Crafty Greenbelters also got a chance to fashion holiday wreaths out of fragrant evergreen branches.

The “Wasteland” and “Alternative Evolution” series are the other side of this cozy local scene — a silent reproach to the overabundance of our material culture and the built-in wastefulness of contemporary technology, where every new innovation renders all previous iterations obsolete.

But the exhibit is not preachy or hectoring about the dangers of technological waste, rather it is humorous and playful. And that humor is reflected in the comments left in the guestbook.

My favorite was a quick pen-and-ink sketch of a large machinelike bird of prey with the words “Where’s my baby!!!” That somehow expressed it all. Celarier’s works tease us with the tensions between the familiar and the terrifying.

But even more alarming is contemplating how the evolutionary paths of many species have already been altered by interactions with humans. Celarier cites the example of the bowerbird who gathers brightly colored trash to decorate its nest and attract mates.

The imagination doesn’t have to stretch too far to envision entirely new species — the creatures in this show — emerging from the primordial ooze of our landfills.

The artist himself — in his written statement accompanying the show — prompts us to view his creations “as dealing with difficult problems that have no common-sense solutions.

Celarier refers to an idea he credits to William Rathje, director of the Garbage Project on how rapid technological product enhancement causes obsolete technological objects to bridge the gap between treasure and trash, joining 40 million other units in yearly parade. "How does the human mind regard equipment, so initially expensive and functional, as valueless?” Celarier asked.

Check out the “Alternative Evolution” and the “Wasteland,” series at the Greenbelt Community Center Art Gallery up until Jan. 8.