Randy Colosky's current solo show at ampersand international arts in Dogpatch wanders all over the map, and I mean that in the best way possible. Ranging from sculpture and works on paper to video and conceptual art, Colosky's work in this exhibition (most of it created within the last year) is unified by his absolute mastery of wildly varied materials as well as a spirit of playful curiosity. He uses ink to create dizzying repetitions in his Nondeterministic Algorithm series (one pictured here) and creates regulated grids out of cut bricks in another piece called On the Shoulders of Giants. With a wink to the viewer he fills rivulets cut into board with cement, casts a cinder block in bronze and then paints it to look like the real thing, prints aerial views of the recent Gulf oil spill onto paper towels. And in perhaps my favorite piece, he went down to Jackson Arms (the same range where years ago I fired a gun for the first and last time in a futile attempt to win back a boy's heart), shot a folded piece of graph paper full of holes, and then unfolded it like a craft-project snowflake to reveal intricate patterns. Out of savagery, beauty.
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