Art: Fiber sculpture with the verve of dance

Nick Cave's art is vivacious, exciting, and transformative. Its unique sensibility emerges from the convergence of a number of aesthetic languages - African art, painting, fashion design, textile patterning and textures, dance, and, most identifiably, sculpture.

The 15 "soundsuits" that he's showing at the Fabric Workshop and Museum evoke all of these genres, and yet they aren't simple extensions of any of them. Cave doesn't disguise his sources, but he blends them so skillfully that the results are completely sui generis.

Cave heads the fashion department at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago. That might explain the genesis of the dazzling soundsuits, except that he once explained in an interview that "I don't really look at fashion. . . . I'm interested in couture principles."

He's also African American, which could account for the bold forms and rich, variegated surfaces of his sculptures, qualities common in African and African American folk art. In fact, one might initially mistake some of them, especially those profusely covered with buttons, for the latter.

Yet the imaginative variety of these fiber sculptures, and especially their meticulous craftsmanship, sets them apart from the creations of self-taught naifs. (Cave, born in 1959, graduated from two prestigious art academies, Kansas City Art Institute and Cranbrook Academy of Art.)

When you factor in the potential for performance, realized in two videos that are part of the show, you arrive at an art form that combines powerful visual expression with the emotion and infectious energy of dance theater.

The soundsuits are displayed on mannequins, but with all but four only the legs show, reminiscent of the dancing cigarette packages in old television commercials. They're imposing too, ranging in height from about seven to more than nine feet.

One could imagine the suits as totemic ceremonial costumes, except that there doesn't seem to be any way to see out of them. The ceremony in this case is lighthearted and life-affirming; one suit is made of stuffed toys, another of small throw rugs.

Four suits are more conventionally figurative. Covered with long platinum-blond hair, they resemble friendly yetis. The performers in the video Drive By, projected in the gallery where the suits are displayed, also wear hairy, multicolored costumes that flop and flow like waves as they roll and tumble across the floor.

Cave opened this exhibition several weeks ago with a performance that featured about a dozen dancers, several musicians, and a colorful environment of painted bamboo called Architectural Forest. The performance is video-projected on the first floor; the forest stands in the performance space on the eighth.

A collaboration between the artist and the Workshop staff, Architectural Forest is a magical creation, pieced together from hundreds, perhaps thousands, of thin bamboo segments strung together into hanging strands in the configuration of a broad arrowhead.

The recycled bamboo (from door and window curtains) has been randomly painted in a way that creates shimmering bands and clusters of soft color, like abstract impressionism. Where the soundsuits are demonstrative, the forest is poetic, soothing, and contemplative, a perfect counterpoint.

Bolande's sleight of eye. In 1988, Jennifer Bolande had an exhibition at Beaver College in Glenside, now Arcadia University. If you remember it (I didn't until I looked it up), her show at the Institute of Contemporary Art will feel like a reprise, because it contains some of the same objects.

The things Bolande makes might be characterized as conceptual materializations. Most of them aren't particularly interesting as objects per se, but more for what they suggest about perception of everyday reality and the vagaries of memory, and how they make people aware of visual coincidences.

Photographs are Bolande's basic tool, not images that she makes but those she finds in published sources such as newspapers that she combines, juxtaposes, and sometimes rephotographs. The message is her medium, rather than the other way round.

The essence of the message isn't always easy to determine, because she rarely gives her audience more than minimal clues as to what kinds of connections she's suggesting.

This renders her art elusive and seemingly insubstantial, a way of creating transient links between events and consonances that in real life might register in the brain as unrelated fragments. Her work is so consistently arcane in this way that it's even difficult to describe.

One needs to peruse these 40 objects at least several times, and ideally many more than that, before the incongruities become nuances, and the nuances finally transmute into piquant certainties.

You will notice, for instance, that Bolande repeats certain shapes and forms, particularly cones, circles and rectangles as embodied by audio speakers, refrigerators, washing machines, and modernist buildings. She also likes playing with images of hanging curtains and drapes.

Usually, she extracts from the man-made world rather than from nature. In Appliance House, a typical melding of incongruous parts, she arranges contact-sheet photos of refrigerators and sections of a gridded building facade in a framed configuration that mimics a modernist tower.

Perhaps the most concrete example of Bolande's way of reformulating reality is Milk Crown, a white porcelain realization of a famous stroboscopic photograph by Harold Edgerton of a splattering drop of milk.

It represents a microsecond of historical time twice removed, first by the original photograph and then by its translation into a durable object.

The event was so fleeting it couldn't be recorded by the eye. Even Edgerton's photographic print eventually will deteriorate. Milk Crown is an illusion that can last forever, yet only the event remains truly authentic.

The Bolande exhibition, organized at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, prompts us to reflect on the reliability of visual experience - particularly on the amount of subliminal stimulation to which we fail to respond.

Ultimately the exhibition presents a paradox, in that it suggests a sense of gravity through ephemerality. There aren't many obvious handholds in Bolande's work, which makes one want to try all the harder to extract meaning and pleasure from it.

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