Also this issue: Cloaking Devices Susan Fenton and Anne Seidman create revealing work that plays hard to get. -Robin Rice Paradise Redefined -Susan Hagen First Friday Focus Becoming: Shakespeare -Debra Auspitz The Outside In -Sam Adams Anatomy Lessons -Meredith Broussard The (Un)Beat(en) Generation -Paul Burress All-Ages Art -Sam Adams

October 3- 9, 2002

artpicks

Politics Unusual

Using radical takes on current events as an artistic template is nothing new. Artists as diverse as George Grosz and Robert Motherwell have essayed topical subjects with varying degrees of heavy hearts and hands. Count entrepreneur/enfant terrible Nick Cassway among those numbers. Experimenting with some non-traditional techniques in printmaking (spray paint, plastic bags, static cling material, stamping into concrete, rubber stamps), Cassway's newest exhibit, "Heads," pokes some serious fun at the honchos who have reached the top of their given ladders. Whether painting murderers, court justices or pop stars, Cassway tries not to choose sides. "This notion of being objective is incorporated into the process of making my drawings," he says, noting that he starts finding images for his work online through news feeds or biographical indexes, then redraws everything by hand. How serious is Cassway in relating subject to process? His D.I.Y. War on Terrorism features 24 printed portraits of "good guys" and "bad guys" ("that is, of course, up to the public to decide," he says) using ColorForm material. The portraits can be endlessly rearranged on a 6-foot by 6-foot panel. Cassway's democracy through art is far more fair (and frenzied) than any Florida vote would allow. Huzzah.

“Heads: New Portraits by Nick Cassway,” Oct. 4-27, Nexus Foundation for Today’s Art, 137 N. Second St., 215-629-1103.

—A.D. Amorosi