Nicole Dextras’ IceShifts: Clothing Frozen in Blocks of Ice

A summer shirt stands upright in a block of ice on a frozen beach, its folds and colours locked inside, with no one wearing it. Vancouver environmental artist Nicole Dextras calls the series IceShifts: everyday clothes, from shirts and dresses to trousers and wool socks, frozen in ice and photographed outdoors until the weather takes them apart.

Nicole Dextras and IceShifts

Dextras is a graduate of Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, where she taught as a sessional instructor from 2003 to 2013. She describes herself as an environmental artist working in many media, and her installations have appeared in Spain, Mongolia, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Dawson City in the Yukon, Seattle, Portland, Albuquerque and Fullerton, California.

IceShifts is an ongoing collection of smaller projects. She suspends shirts, pants, socks and dresses in frozen water, sets the blocks in outdoor landscapes and photographs them. The work lasts only as long as the ice does, and that impermanence is the point. In her words, “This frozen wardrobe acts as a metaphor for the multilayered affinities between the self and the environment.” She describes the garments as “unmasked shape shifters,” seeming to dance while “simultaneously forming and deforming.”

Castaways: summer clothes on Toronto Island

One chapter of the series, Castaways, was photographed on Toronto Island, a small lakeside community with a beach and amusement park that is busy in summer and almost deserted in winter. Dextras imagined the frozen clothes as the spirits of the theme park, left out of season and waiting for the thaw: a tropical beach-stand shirt, a small-town circus clown outfit, a lacy summer top.

She compares each image to “an isolated silent film still”, a single frame that leaves viewers to invent the story around it.

Pharos: a glowing ice wall at Winterlude

For Pharos, Dextras built six frozen blocks outdoors, each about five feet (1.5 m) high, and showed them at Winterlude, Ottawa’s winter festival. Inside the ice she set sheer fabrics, green and red scarves, a lace cameo, a shawl, lace cuffs and wool socks, so that sunlight passed through and the row of blocks glowed like a crystalline wall. The six figures echo the early outdoor winter carnivals, and Dextras described them as dancing to coax the sun back: “a beacon of hope, from the dark towards the light.”

Ice words and plant-based clothing

Ice is only one of Dextras’ materials. In Signs of Change she carved words in ice and left them to melt in Vancouver’s streets, a comment on the real-estate boom around Coal Harbour. Her Little Green Dress project went the other way, making compostable garments from plants. Her portfolio groups the work under headings such as Frozen Textiles, Botanical WearAbles, Public Interventions and Social Typography.

For more art made from winter itself, see other approaches to temporary winter art, small ice figures designed to disappear, and Thomas Zakowski’s spectacular icicles dripping from a frozen lighthouse.

Related reading

• A Wet T-Shirt Freezes in Dubuque: Temperature and Wind Chill
• Other approaches to temporary winter art

Sources