By Brandon Bussolini
Neon colors and animal themes are on a short list of art/design memes just past their prime, waiting for eager replacements. Randy Colosky’s new show at Adobe Books, “The Circus (in My Mind) Is in Town,” trades heavily on both of these tropes: lean rectangles of dayglo construction paper form the backdrop, and occasionally weave in and out of collaged Hubble telescope photos, a smudged stampede of grizzlies, and an artfully draped, scratchily rendered snake.
In other pieces, pagodas poke out of tiny, puffy clouds like soft teeth, or those same clouds drop down golden entrails like a skyborne Portuguese Man o’ War. There’s a seriality at work across these images that doesn’t attempt to amount to a narrative, however elliptical. Instead, there’s a building up and stripping down of materials – the busiest pieces and the most spare, such as Post Tool Similization 2, meet up in a kind of post-human serenity.
Although sublimated, Fort Thunder – the Providence, RI, warehouse space that gave birth to Lightning Bolt, Mindflayer, Forcefield, and their eye-poppingly busy, extensively neon brand of art – is one of Colosky’s inspirations here, along with Chinese scroll painting. (Colosky maintained scene continuity by inviting former Providence resident and current SF dweller John Dwyer’s Oh Sees to play the opening tonight, Wed/19.)