Nick Cave: Moving Spirits – Miami Art Exchange

BY Steven Scorpio

Size counts in the art of fabric and multimedia artist Nick Cave, whose “sound suits” stand some seven feet tall. Also color—a dazzling palette of candy-like hues—and materials—a thrift store tornado of secondhand clothing, cloth, feathers, glitter, beads, baubles and all other manner of found objects. Gorgeous and playful, nearly 40 of Cave’s fantastical suits parade through “Meet Me at the Center of the Earth,” the Norton Museum’s show of his work, which runs through January 9.

Cave trained as a dancer with Alvin Ailey, and his turn into visual arts incorporates that background. In addition to static viewing, the suits are meant to be worn and seen in action, married to choreography and street parades. The Norton has scheduled a series of performances to show the suits in that context.

The first of those was in mid-October, when dance students from a local Christian college dressed in Cave’s pieces and, to the sound of twin percussionists, turned the West Palm Beach building’s atrium into a pagan temple. The suits, all fluorescent feathers and filaments, flowed across the dancers’ bodies like sheaves of wheat in the wind, leaving visual echoes that reverberated on the eye. What the school’s trustees would have made of the event is anyone’s guess, but the audience was captivated.

If there is a Christian strain to Cave’s work (and it mimics imagery from a number of spiritual traditions: native American, voudou, African) it is the pentecostal category of “charismata,” in which spiritual gifts descend on the soul. Best known of these gifts is that of speaking in tongues.

For Cave, the gift is speaking in color, materials and form. Along with the sound suits, whose sophisticated design aligns them with haute couture, there are mixed media pieces–“relics”–in the folk art tradition, combining found objects out of black Americana (lawn jockeys, “mammy” figurines) in surreal and provocative ways.

Cave is based in Chicago, where he teaches in the Fiber Arts Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has also designed clothing lines, but his fashion connection is not to be misread. Cave’s work is not in the least superficial. Serious themes undergird his art, which draws on threads (no pun intended) of history and society that span the globe and the human experience. While none of the work incorporates overtly political themes, ideas of community and celebration are embedded in Cave’s creative process and in his performance pieces.

The participatory, collective spirit that infuses the suits and the performances also suffuses two pieces that, for this writer, are the show’s high point—mammoth, twin mandalas nearly 20 feet in diameter, sewn together by Cave’s team of assistants out of found beaded and sequined garments. Hung on facing walls of one room like totems of a future lost civilization, the paired works’ immensity and richly varied detail demands stunned meditation.

Other viewers will settle on other pieces. No matter. Cave’s Norton show reveals an artist infused with spirit, overflowing with ideas and lately coming into the full richness of his unique vision.

Nick Cave sound suit performances at the Norton:

November 11, Art after Dark: 5:30, 6:30, 7:30.

January 9, Exhibition Lecture by Nick Cave: 4:00.

Off-site:

November 19, 20, Borland Center, Palm Beach Gardens

http://www.pba.edu/performances/index.cfm