Recommended reading @tmagazine #Repost ・・・Best known for his Soundsuits — many of which are ornate, full-body costumes designed to rattle and resonate with the movement of the wearer — the work of Nick Cave (@nickcaveart ), which combines sculpture, fashion and performance, connects the anxieties and divisions of our time to the intimacies of the body. Exhibited in galleries or worn by dancers, the suits — fanciful assemblages that include bright pelts of dyed hair, twigs, sequins, repurposed sweaters, crocheted doilies, gramophones or even stuffed sock-monkey dolls, their eerie grins covering an entire supersize garment — are compulsively, unsettlingly decorative. Some are amusingly creature-like; others are lovely in an almost ecclesiastical way, bedecked with shimmering headpieces embellished with beads and porcelain birds and other discarded tchotchkes he picks up at flea markets. Even at the level of medium, Cave operates against entrenched hierarchies, elevating glittery consumer detritus and traditional handicrafts like beadwork or sewing to enchanting heights. Their origins are less intellectual than emotional, as Cave tells it, and they’re both playful and deadly serious. He initially conceived of them as a kind of race-, class- and gender-obscuring armature, one that’s both insulating and isolating, an articulation of his profound sense of vulnerability as a black man. “I just want everything to be fabulous,” he told Megan O’Grady (@meganeogrady) for her profile as part of #TGreatsIssue in 2019. “I want it to be beautiful, even when the subject is hard. Honey, the question is, how do you want to exist in the world, and how are you going to do the work?” Click the link in our bio to read O’Grady’s full piece. A retrospective of Cave’s art is running at @mcachicago until Oct. 2. Photo by Renée Cox (@reneecoxsoul). Catalog copy listed by @delmonico_books