Neon circus: Randy Colosky's day-glo animal kingdom
By Brandon Bussolini
Neon colors and animal themes are on a short list of art/design memes just past their prime, waiting for eager replacements. Randy Colosky’s new show at Adobe Books, “The Circus (in My Mind) Is in Town,” trades heavily on both of these tropes: lean rectangles of dayglo construction paper form the backdrop, and occasionally weave in and out of collaged Hubble telescope photos, a smudged stampede of grizzlies, and an artfully draped, scratchily rendered snake.
In other pieces, pagodas poke out of tiny, puffy clouds like soft teeth, or those same clouds drop down golden entrails like a skyborne Portuguese Man o’ War. There’s a seriality at work across these images that doesn’t attempt to amount to a narrative, however elliptical. Instead, there’s a building up and stripping down of materials - the busiest pieces and the most spare, such as Post Tool Similization 2, meet up in a kind of post-human serenity.
Although sublimated, Fort Thunder - the Providence, RI, warehouse space that gave birth to Lightning Bolt, Mindflayer, Forcefield, and their eye-poppingly busy, extensively neon brand of art - is one of Colosky’s inspirations here, along with Chinese scroll painting. (Colosky maintained scene continuity by inviting former Providence resident and current SF dweller John Dwyer’s Oh Sees to play the opening tonight, Wed/19.)
It feels too intentional to be entirely correct, but Colosky’s sense of color, geometry, and space - the way he stacks boxes of color and lets them ooze out of the frame - reminds me of Hans Hoffmann’s mysteriously levitating blocks. When animals get pushed out of the frame, as in the excellently titled Electronical Arts, the pieces take on an almost nostalgic cast. There seems to be some question of why the future hasn’t managed to supercede humans yet. On the other hand, animals inhabit pieces like the above-mentioned Post Tool Similization 2 with a certain kind of autonomy.
I’m not familiar with Colosky’s drawing style in other works, but something in his sketching here almost suggests the pages were torn from his sixth-grade composition book. The awkward handling of the trio of grizzlies that emerge from decorative swirls in Ode to Valencia Gardens seems like a deliberate choice: apart from the blunt-tip shading, the animals seem to shift inside their own fur, childish awe keeps them suspended between anthropomorphism and being reduced to, say, an appliqué on a quilted tote bag.
In the tidy little critical narrative I just set up, Celestial Ways would be the middle point within Colosky’s cyclical tendencies: in it, a deer pokes along a meadow against craggy mountains, from which rise up a holy celestial plaid interrupted by firmament. It might be the most immediately arresting image out of the bunch, but seeing it, I feel my attention spill out of both ends, towards the rational excess of the day-glo strips on the one hand and the horizonless play of animals on the other.
RANDY COLOSKY
Opening Wed/19 with a performance by the Oh Sees
Adobe Book Shop
3166 16th St., SF
(415) 864-3936
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