Soundsuits — by Nick Cave

The New York Times called them "hirsute onesies."

Blake Gopnik, writing in the January 25, 2009 Washington Post, had this to say:

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Nick Cave, a 49-year-old artist who is chairman of the fashion department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,

doesn't make the kind of esoteric, virtually unsellable work of some of the conceptualists now showing in Chelsea.

Cave's pieces seem esoteric in a quite different way.

He's best known for what he calls 'Soundsuits': 'wearable sculptures,' or costumes, that enclose their wearers, hiding every trace of their identities.

For his second Jack Shainman exhibition, Cave has presented a new series of ultra-shaggy Soundsuits, made from garishly colored hair.

Anyone who wore one would look rather like Chewbacca the Wookiee, after an accident in a dye works. Other new suits are more form-fitting, sometimes looking as though they've been assembled out of crocheted pot-holders.

These tighter suits are then topped with huge "masks" that conceal a wearer's head and chest behind bizarre constructions of fake flowers, plastic birds or fragments of fabric.

There seem to be clear references, in all this work, to the body-hiding masks and costumes of certain African cultures.

But where those outfits reinforce a single cultural identity, Cave's seem meant to set their wearers free.

For anyone who, like Cave, grew up black in the United States, there might be something to be said for a new world

where every person could choose to look absolutely, unrecognizably different from everyone else.

One last, perhaps surprising note: A week into the show, Shainman had managed to sell a number of such apparently unsellable works."

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The Shainman show closed on February 7, 2009.

Cave's new show opens at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on March 28, where it will remain through July 5, 2009.