In the vibrant Milwaukee art scene, artist Nykoli Koslow (they/he) has been busy worldbuilding. Working primarily in painting and drawing but extending into installation, video, and virtual reality, Koslow has spent the past decade creating abstract paintings and other-worldly scenes rooted in what he calls queer abundancies and alien semiotics. In these works, Koslow increasingly represents trans experiences as something simultaneously ancient and futuristic, personal and cosmic.
Koslow was raised in a household where his Christian mother and Jewish father’s influences were overshadowed by the conservative ideologies forced upon them at the Christian schools he attended. He was sent to a Lutheran junior high and high school that taught creationism instead of science. Students were required to memorize “facts” about how the earth was created in seven days.
Disillusionment in School
“If you had a logical mind, you just didn’t do well,” Koslow recalls. “I wasn’t trying to challenge anybody; it was so illogical.” They remember the feeling of disillusionment when an elementary school teacher refused to verify the fact that dinosaurs lived before humans. Eventually, this questioning led to a profound realization: Religion itself is a form of worldbuilding, in that religions create cohesive fictions that include geographies, cultures, rules, language, and social structures.
“I was born an atheist, so I never bought into religion. I always considered myself an outsider looking in, even though I was within it,” they explain. “I always tried to dissect their beliefs and their reasoning. I tried to understand why they hated gay people. I tried to follow their threads of reasoning, and the stories that they spun around themselves to believe in that. That is why I got into mythmaking and recreating biblical myths in my own way, because I was immersed in people that existed in a reality that wasn’t a reality, but they all convinced themselves that it was reality. They all made it real.”
Koslow’s experience sparked their fascination with ideologies. “Just trying to understand why they thought the way they did made me really interested in how we construct the world that we live in. And how we can tell new stories to create better worlds.”
Finding Freedom in Painting
What began as a survival mechanism evolved when Koslow discovered painting during his undergraduate studies at UW-Milwaukee. Originally an English major, he took an art class and immediately fell in love.
“It felt like complete freedom. You can do whatever you want,” he said. The first time he worked in oil, he knew he had found his niche. “My painting is more of an immediate mark-making to build something up. It is very dopamine-friendly. As soon as I did oils for the first time, I knew it was my medium. I am still an oil painter before anything else.”
After graduating in 2013, Koslow worked in the service industry while painting in his limited free time. In 2015, his breakthrough came via participation in the first 30×30 exhibition at Var Gallery, which led to a studio there and deeper immersion in Milwaukee’s arts scene. In 2017 he participated in the MARN Mentor/Mentee program with Jason S. Yi, one of Wisconsin’s most prominent artists, forming a close relationship that furthered his artistic development.