Art

Working for over 25 years, Colosky has honed his artistic practice using drawing and sculpture to re-contextualize commonplace materials into transformative visual poetics. Steeped in design, science, history, and humor, Colosky establishes a polarity between familiar and unfamiliar, which engages and often surprises the viewer. His material–driven conceptual works range from two–dimensional drawings and paintings to three–dimensional sculptures in a variety of media. Artist Statement: My work incorporates utilitarian materials, processes and concepts, which I then re-contextualize though unorthodox interventions to create a dialogue with the viewer as to how the functional and commonplace aspects of the everyday are capable of generating transformative poetic experiences. By utilizing content from science, history and underlying humor to form the language of my work, I strive to set up a visual polarity of what is familiar and unfamiliar as a way to engage the viewer about time and timelessness. This polarity offers an expansion to the accepted experience of engagement; the familiar representing what we know and have experienced and the unfamiliar representing the question of where we are going. My practice is multivalent. I typically work a variety of materials and concepts at once. My motivation is to be open to intuitive, as well as formal, development in my work as a way to continue to build on my vocabulary and remain inspired at a level that that inspiration can be translated in my works and projects. 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 recently completed an artist residency at the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park.