r. colosky: Don’t Forget Your Earthquake Pants

May 2, 2025 - May 23, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 2nd from 5-7pm

Gallery Hours: Tues - Sat 11am - 5pm
Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco

re.riddle is pleased to present Don’t Forget Your Earthquake Pants, a solo exhibition of new works by R. Colosky. The opening reception is on Saturday, May 2nd from 5-7pm. The exhibition runs through May 23rd, 2026.

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.

Artworks

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