Randy Colosky: WHITE HOT

February 5 - March 24, 2016

Randy Colosky’s exhibition White Hot will feature a new series of glass sculptures. Colosky typically employs diverse media in his art practice. In addition to drawing, painting, and video as part of his oeuvre, the prolific artist has created three-dimensional pieces using ceramic, brick, metal, cast bronze and glass. Though his often reductive works are rooted in materiality, Colosky may be described as a conceptual artist. Like Paul Kos and David Ireland, predecessors in Bay Area Conceptualism, he uses both constructed and found objects to convert the ordinary and overlooked into something poetic and mesmerizing.

The new work in White Hot will include an array of linear forms the artist cast using opaline glass, which gives the sculptures a cool, luminous quality.  To make the work, Colosky cast wax sticks, also called sprues, apparatuses used as channels during a bronze casting, through which the molten material is poured into a mold.

Taking the wax sticks out of their functional context, the artist continues his practice of transforming commonplace objects into new, curious and compelling forms that transcend their original nature. The resulting abstract works give the appearance of three-dimensional scrawls or characters from a foreign alphabet, each comprised of a single continuous line that twists and curls into itself.

Randy Colosky earned his BFA in ceramics at the Kansas City Art Institute.  He has exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art, the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Ampersand International Arts and Adobe Books Back Room in San Francisco.  Colosky is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including those from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation and the Fleischhacker Foundation. Recent public art projects include San Francisco Public Art Commission (mural for subway construction wall), Downtown Oakland Art Park, and Paradise Ridge Winery in Santa Rosa. Colosky is currently completing an artist residency at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park. White Hot is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.