Randy Colosky @ Chandra Cerrito

WH-Kiln 2, 2016, opaline lead crystal on aluminum table 12 x 19 x 20” glass 48 1/4 x 24 x 24” overall

 

 

The opalescent, worm-like forms inching across Randy Colosky’s handmade lab tables are the newest incarnations of his multifarious studio practice.  Colosky has been on the Bay Area scene since the early 2000s.  Restlessly pushing his material inquiries, he works in the crevices between Minimalism, Conceptualism and mad science.  White Hot continues his tried-and-true strategy of exploiting found quotidian materials as entities to be stressed, molded, repurposed and stretched.  Deepening his game, Colosky’s new work uses glass (opaline lead crystal) cast from sprues, the wax rods used as channels for pouring molten metal in bronze casting. Like those of Rachel Whiteread, Colosky’s casts focus on line and negative form, creating ambiguous objects of unexpected tension, while also bringing to mind at a vastly reduced scale, the twisted symmetries of Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002).

 

WH-Kiln 1-2, 2016 opaline lead crystal on aluminum table 12-1/2 x 15-1/2 x 8-1/2” glass 46-3/4 x 24 x 12” overall

Colosky’s modest, domestically scaled linear forms are individually displayed on aluminum tables fabricated to look like lab furniture.  Avoiding the frequently troublesome issue of pedestals, this presentation suggests a darkly witty commentary on the nature of cultural consumption.  Covering the tabletops with black rubber, Colosky invites us to peer down upon milky and luminous glass forms — the writhing, insinuating specimens of his experimental casting process. 

Like all the work in this show, WH-Kiln 1-1 is both a sinuous and abrupt linear contortion.  It critiques traditional ideas of internal and external space, beginning and end, and suggests there isn’t much difference between emptiness and fullness.  It appears to be a structure procreating in mid air or the fossilized embodiment of a looping, painterly Brice Marden gesture.   

 

Seen as a group, his work gives the impression of fragments extracted from a larger system or context, like the letters of an alphabet.  And to the extent they implicate transformation, the work connotes former and future postures, or, other unknown functions. They are suspended gestures in both time and space, becoming transitional or relational objects. We question what they are.  We question what they mean.  But the work’s resistance to articulated meaning only expands its presence and psychic impact.  The chemical aspect of the work, in particular, and its mineral qualities, evoke larger geological matrices from which these associations emerge, as if the moulds had been washed or sandblasted away to expose these embedded connective forms.  In the end, it doesn’t matter what Colosky’s sculptures are or what they mean. Both yin and yang, being and becoming, positive and negative, these works are born of sculptural actions that beg more questions than they answer.

 

WH-Kiln 3, 2016, opaline lead crystal on aluminum table

 

 

Julia Couzens is a Sacramento-based artist and writer whose work has been widely shown, most recently at the di Rosa Preserve.  Her drawings and hybrid objects are in museum and public collections throughout the U.S.  These include the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts; Berkeley Art Museum; Oakland Museum; Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina; and Yale University.  She lives and works on Merritt Island in the Sacramento River delta.