re.riddle is pleased to present, Don't Forget Your Earthquake Pants, a solo exhibition of new work by R. Colosky. The opening reception is Saturday, May 2, from 5-7 pm at 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco. The exhibition runs through May 23, 2026. To request a work list, please email info@reriddle.com.

Exhibition Statement

Don’t Forget Your Earthquake Pants, a solo exhibition of new works by R. Colosky, delves into the transcendence and weight of urban anxiety, an affect produced by the cumulative pressures of environmental instability, technological acceleration, and late capitalism. Colosky's paintings and installations register these psychological and emotional currents via imagery drawn from art history as well as contemporary visual culture.

Colosky’s reductive blue-and-white color motif situates the work within a long historical lineage, referencing Yuan and Ming dynasty porcelain, Dutch Delftware, and British Willow pattern. Although historically revered, this aesthetic carries a complex history of empire and trade, in which cultural admiration is entangled with appropriation and fetishization. Colosky understands this lineage through his studies of ceramics and eastern art history and works knowingly within it, maintaining an edge of slight irreverence alongside the aesthetic strategy of lush beauty.

At first glance, his paintings of fluffy clouds, flowering branches, and ethereal birds softened by airbrush appear pleasurable and serene. Upon closer inspection, sharply stenciled lines cut through the decorative surfaces, revealing surveillance cameras among blossoms, broken water pipes through the mist, and cell towers beside melting mountains. Colosky works improvisationally, adding and subtracting elements to create underlayers of painted imagery that function as embedded metadata, disclosed through close and careful looking.

His Ice Works are dynamic sculptural installations that explore natural phenomena through technological intervention. Working with refrigeration mechanics, Colosky harnesses Freon gas and ambient humidity to accumulate ice crystals along copper tubing. At critical points, the system’s power is cut. The ice melts, drips downward, and waters the seeds in fertile soil beneath. The cycle then begins again. By staging the full arc of phase transition, from gas to solid, solid to liquid, and liquid back to gas, the Ice Works reflect the fundamental physical processes of the natural world. They unfold over an extended duration, asking the viewer for sustained attention and to return to witness the growth stages of the foliage.

Altogether, Colosky’s paintings and installations frame contemporary life as a post-apocalyptic condition in which catastrophe has been absorbed into the everyday and transfigured as eerie beauty. His work gives form to the weight of being human, its anxieties, pressures, and precarity, rendering these conditions legible through the formal language of luscious beauty and playful skepticism. In Don’t Forget Your Earthquake Pants, gravitas is worn lightly, reflecting an earnest attentiveness to balancing one’s existential weight. Colosky navigates the unbearable lightness of being and critical density in a carefully calibrated register, where levity is a condition through which depth is sustained.

REQUEST ARTWORK LIST


ABOUT

Randy Colosky (b. 1965) is an interdisciplinary artist working in both established and unorthodox materials and processes. Ranging from traditional oil painting to frozen installations, his divergent practice is informed by history, science, and a deep curiosity about nature and how its elements interact. Colosky received a BFA in Ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1987. He has been awarded grants from the Warhol Foundation for the Arts, The Fleishacker Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and KALA Art Institute. He has shown in many galleries and museums, including The Jewish Museum, The Museum of Craft and Design San Francisco, and Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, Jeffrey Deitch Projects Los Angeles, The Hole Los Angeles and Kavi Gupta Chicago Ill. He has public art projects placed in Laguna Beach, Oakland, San Francisco, Livermore, San Bruno, and Santa Rosa CA. His work is in several collections including BAMPFA, Meta Platforms Inc., Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, The Battery San Francisco, Alameda Municipal Art Collection, Oakland CA, and Ellie Mae Financial Services.

All inquiries: info@reriddle.com