NykolI Koslow
Bio
Nykoli Koslow is a Milwaukee-based artist. While primarily a painter, his practice often extends into drawing, installation, and VR. Fusing figuration with abstraction, Nykoli anchors his innate trans* experience within a queer mythic cosmology. Pulling from personal experience and reinterpretations of familial and cultural histories, he spins myth, religion, mysticism, and sci-fi–imbedded conspiracy theories to create worlds rooted in queer abundance and psychedelic chromophilia. For Nykoli, the alien becomes a metaphor for otherness and a practice in authentic expression in defiance of dominating hegemonic structures.
Nykoli earned his BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Peck School of the Arts, in 2013. He has exhibited at the Museum of Wisconsin Art’s 10 at 10 exhibition (2023) and the Wisconsin Artist Biennial (2024). From 2021 to 2022, he was the Artist in Residence at the Pfister Hotel, culminating in his solo show Queer Mythologies: TransAbstractions at Saint Kate Arts Hotel. His work is in the permanent collections including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Union, the Pfister Hotel Legacy Collection, and Northwestern Mutual Art Program. In 2023, he was accepted into the gener8tor Art x Sherman Phoenix Accelerator fall cohort and is currently represented by Var Gallery, where he exhibited Queer Cosmology: The Making of a Universe in 2023.
statement
My work transforms the visceral feelings of being in a trans* body into a queer mythos and cosmology. Working through abstraction’, the visual language of mark-making takes precedence and works metaphorically to express the particularity of my lived experience in a non-normative gender. The return to figuration utilizes narrative as a way to create my own doctrine. Loosely inspired, I then spin my own myths to reimagine a religion and culture where trans* people are centered as deities and G-d’s and queerness is the norm.
Part autobiographical and part research based, I concurrently look into the stories of trans* peoples and concepts as told throughout history, myth and religion - staying close to my familial cultural history of Ashkenazi Judaism, European Christianity and associated folk-lore. Taking liberties, I weave in my own personal narrative. The pivotal moments of my life navigating a nonlinear transition; the dysphoria, euphoria, and social dispositions, sprout various avatars who parallel my journey and become extensions of my identity.
The Earth 38.2 series follows my ever-evolving avatar through a parallel world that spans both the ancient past, before Eden, and a distant future, after dystopia, where nature reclaims the earth and remnants of our 'fall' linger with anxious suspicion. Here, as I navigate life’s fragility and contend with the unraveling around us, I dream of deep ecologies as a vital call to weave new worlds.
These avatars exist in a universe that draws on the etymology of the word queer, ’twerkw”. Consequently, lines become odd, bent, twisted, oblique, and inverted in the matrix of its framework. Moral, physical and social laws are tweaked creating an ideology that is fluid, malleable and open.
These re-imagined worlds offer both a retreat from reality, and a certain way of facing it. In this space, I can perpetually rewrite my own truth and re-fabricate my very being. I can place myself in a history that’s only written trans* people in its margins, validate my identity in a present that seeks to fight it, and imagine new futures I wouldn’t think possible.