Art: "Flourish" is pretty (tough) in pink

Don't let the sweet pastels in "Flourish" lull you into thinking the show is just a girlish bonbon. Girl vibes pulse through the exhibit, which runs through Jan. 2 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, but they're cross-checked by edgy undercurrents of surrealism, sexual ambiguity, and waifish satire.

And to further muddle the message, two of the four artists are guys.

Organized by the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, the show features work by Minnesota residents.

A gentle note of domesticity floats through the large drawings of Erika Olson Gross with their quilt patterns, toys and North Woods imagery. She deftly combines realistic pencil sketches with colorful geometric designs. In "Dream Quilt," the heads of her two young sons appear, snuggled in sleep, at the apex of an ornamental frieze of triangles arranged in a quilt-like pattern. By reducing everything to its essence, her drawings gain sophistication through simplicity.

Joe Sinness has an amazing way with colored pencils, achieving trompe l'oeil effects. Flowers are the unifying element in each still life, providing textured bowers for complicated images that appear to be reflected in a glass bubble (Barbra Streisand), mirror (a fawn figurine) and glass tumbler (a gray-haired woman). A few of the pairings introduce suggestive socio-sexual themes. Among the latter, "If Only" is strikingly clever: Below a bouquet of luxurious parrot tulips Sinness' reproduces part of a famous and once controversial Thomas Eakins swimming scene featuring a half-dozen naked men. Reflected in an overturned glass, the 19th-century nudes seem preserved like biological specimens or an au natural mirage of masculine bonding.

Worried waifs have their moment in the show's second gallery shared by Jennifer Davis and Terrence Payne. Davis has attracted a loyal local following with her charming illustrations of winsome animals (dogs, sheep) and sweetly surrealistic critters (sloth, balding green alien) all dressed up and doing human things (twiddling their fingers, riding bikes). Endlessly inventive and gently strange, her characters are simultaneously unsettling and endlessly appealing.

By contrast, Payne favors bold colors and pop wallpaper backgrounds for his galaxy of aggrieved gals. At roughly 4 feet square, each of his drawings features a woman in self-inflicted comic distress. The titles derive from phrases scrawled onto the drawings like errant thought bubbles. "It's Not So Much for My Safety as It Is Yours," for example, depicts a young woman with a peeved expression and pink hair, whose mouth is muzzled and arms pinned by thick black straps. Another wearing a snarling bear hat with antlers appears to be thinking "If My Charms Don't Work Then My Hat Ought To." Payne's drawings suggest the frustrated bemusement of a guy still trying to figure out whether girls are made of sugar and spice, or something else entirely.