Don't let the chipped black nail polish fool you. Twenty-eight-year-old artist DC Ice is less a brooding goth than she is a rough-and-tumble snowboarding chick. Her sweet, chirping voice belies the morbid nature of her illustrations -- sinister images culled from a string of brief, and vivid, encounters with gore.
"When I was little, I broke out my best friend's teeth three times," she said.
In a cute, girly pitch she recounts the gruesome leap-frog accident that left her play date's mouth a gnarly mess of wet crimson. ("I held that blame in for so long.") The story reminds her of her own dental trauma, when she spit bloody bits of molar into a plastic cup after a serious car accident. And that's not to mention the time her cat delivered a bunny corpse to her as a present, its neck bent at an agonizing angle.
Ice's style balances cutesy icons of girldom -- scrapbooking stamps, cuddly animals, antique frames -- with a grim Victorian charm. She's like the mirthful daughter of Edward Gorey. Or, if you'd prefer, Jen Davis' evil twin. Scratchy dark lines and mouths crammed full of jagged shards deface a cast of otherwise child-friendly characters. Several of her collages will debut in "I Dreamed I Dream," the Gallery at Fox Tax's offering in this year's Art-A-Whirl festival in northeast Minneapolis.
Sound a little dark for a springtime gallery crawl? Wait 'til you hear who's curating the exhibit: Emma Berg, the bubbly art diva known as much for her merriment as she is for her pink-clad website, mplsart.com. The show kicks off a series of six back-to-back, Berg-directed exhibitions at the hipster accounting office Fox Tax. Though it does fall in line with a few other spook-centric Art-A-Whirl events (check out Dominic Rouse's paranormal portraits at the Ice Box Gallery), "I Dreamed I Dream" is definitely a departure for Berg, whose spring event last year was a bonanza of pastel tones and overripe female fecundity.
So what's with this year's despondency?
"The show is a bit of gloom," Berg admits, "but it is also about escapism, optimism, holding on and moving forward. I want the world to be a dream of sweetness and goodness ... but things become worn. There are cracks in the porcelain."
Still, "I Dreamed I Dream" is far from a bummer. The sheer youth of the artists -- Ice, at 28, is the geezer of the bunch -- coupled with their immense talent and original subject matter makes for a pretty uplifting vibe. These artists are going to be producing enthralling work for a long time.
