Knoxville, TN
6 April 2008 2:44 PM
When you were little and you wondered what happened to your teeth as they fell out of your mouth, your parents probably told you about the Tooth Fairy. What they didn’t tell you was what that pretty lady actually did with your pearly whites. Enter Veronica Siehl, printmaker extraordinaire, who reveals the truth: the Tooth Fairy swallows your teeth whole, and from them grows the structure of her body, her skeleton, her bones. Siehl narrates this and other fantastical stories in her delicate, fabulously detailed Intaglio portraits. There’s the story of the woman whose hairy legs were not flesh but a bevy of sly foxes—but you’d never know it unless she lifted her voluminous skirt of waves, as Siehl cajoles her into doing. And then there’s the lady whose towering bouffant hid a den of furry rabbits, her hair composed of the same marks as the little hares’ ears. Siehl illustrates these grrlish fairy tales with a tart twist of language and an even sassier tweak of mark-making, collapsing young ladies, wily beasts, fur clothes, and a faux-naïf style into a whole that promises to turn the ear not just of the children to whom such tales are normally told, but also the adults who tell them.
—Lori Waxman