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.

Recognition and Traction

Since then, Koslow’s work has found significant recognition within Wisconsin’s art community. In 2021, they served as Artist in Residence at Milwaukee’s historic Pfister Hotel. Though interrupted by the pandemic, the residency proved transformative, providing time and financial support to create a substantial body of work.

“It was a blessing in disguise. The first six months I still got paid to be there,” he reflects. “I was able to get commissions and gigs because I was there, and I got a lot of work done. I didn’t get any other opportunities during Covid, so the fact that I landed that was a huge blessing.”

However, the opportunity came with expectations of propriety that Koslow had to navigate. “I kept them really abstracted so I could still paint their stories, but not do something that would upset anyone.”

The residency culminated in their solo exhibition Queer Mythologies: TransAbstractions (February 25–June 26, 2022) at Saint Kate Hotel, where the gallery space was transformed into what Koslow described as a “queer altar.” The exhibition invited guests to move through vibrant gestural canvases and drawings that enveloped the room, creating an immersive environment where viewers could experience his imagined futuristic universe firsthand.

Painting from Life, Building New Worlds

In his recent series Earth 38.2, started in 2023 and ongoing, Koslow creates a post-apocalyptic, pre-Eden world: “This alien-esque world where these trans beings are recreating these epic mythic narratives.” When asked if the worlds are safe spaces, he offers a nuanced response.

“I think that because there is uncertainty in life, and I only paint from life, that uncertainty is going to show up in everything I create,” he explains. “Even in Eden-esque worlds, Eden is an impossibility in being human. There is always this underlayer of chaos, death, and destruction that exists underneath the surface of everything. So, I think there is an uncertainty and unsettledness to everything I make because that is the world that we live in, and I can’t really make anything outside of that.”

Is it escapism? “Complete escapism doesn’t really exist. Even if I tried to make it complete escapism, I think I set it up to be like that, but then it always mirrors and reflects back everything that I’m dealing with.”

Koslow’s exploration of virtual reality adds another dimension to their artistic practice, wherein VR offers a unique form of embodied experience that resonates with trans identity.

“Trans people have an awareness of their bodies and the limitations of it,” they observe. “They kind of celebrate what their bodies can do in a way that maybe non-trans people don’t think about as readily and easily. I’m aware of the confines of my body and my skin and the limitations of it, maybe moreso than someone who isn’t trans would be aware.”

In VR, this awareness transforms into liberation: “When I exist in the headspace, my body completely ceases to exist. It is just like a space of pure non-embodiment and energy. It helps me exist beyond my body in a very literal way that I don’t have access to otherwise.”

He can trace his body in virtual space and, “Make my body whatever I want it to be in that space, and then I can create the world that I want it to exist in. So, I can have a lot of fun and a lot of freedom within the worlds that don’t exist.” As he puts it, “You get to play God. All art really does feel like that. You get to create whatever you want.”

Inspirations

While few painters are described as worldbuilders, Koslow draws inspiration from various artistic sources. After someone compared his VR work to artist Emma Webster, he became a fan of hers. Webster is a landscape artist whose images have been described as convincing and hallucinatory. He also references contemporary artist Jacolby Satterwhite who creates immersive installations of animation and live-action films. Looking back through historical art, Koslow is fascinated by the illustrations of religious concepts in the hellscapes of Hieronymus Bosch.

His 2023 exhibition Queer Cosmology: The Making of a Universe at Var Gallery (which represents him) demonstrated the evolution of Koslow’s mythological system. He exhibited at the Museum of Wisconsin Art’s Ten at Ten exhibition (2023) and their Wisconsin Artist Biennial (2024), marking him as one of the state’s most promising artists.

More Learning Ahead

Despite their success, Koslow has decided to pursue an MFA at UW–Madison, seeking to deepen their engagement with academic and theoretical frameworks and to have the necessary time and resources to focus on creating new art. They look forward to studying with faculty artists they admire like Fred Stonehouse, Leslie Smith III, and Christina West, as well as learning with and from the other students in the MFA program.

At UW–Madison, Koslow intends to focus on their rendering abilities: “Not necessarily more figurative in a human sense, but I want the characters that I’m creating in this world to be more believable.” They also plan to experiment with different mediums and technologies.

Graduate school, they hope, will give them the freedom to create expanded, uncensored, more kinky, versions of the work they want to make. They believe Madison will provide the platform and conditions necessary to make their dream series, the concept for the next body of work already forming in their mind. “I have all the threads. I’ve been kind of working out what the people are going to look like or what the nature scenes might look like, and the narrative, but putting it all together and creating the actual series, I feel like it will be super-beneficial to have the feedback, the inspiration, and the facilities.”

Nevertheless, They Persist

Koslow’s work persists at a moment when transgender visibility and rights are under threat. Rather than working within existing religious or mythological frameworks, he creates entirely new ones where transness is not just accepted, but foundational. By positioning trans identity as ancient, cosmic, and fundamentally natural, his work challenges the premise that queer and trans identities are somehow new or unnatural.

In an era when many LGBTQ+ artists focus on visibility, representation, or political activism, Koslow’s approach is notably different. He creates parallel universes where the very terms of existence are different, where his sense of queer maximalism and his own alien mythology provide the fundamental building blocks of reality itself.

His philosophy emerges clearly in his own words: “Nature is inherently diverse. Our bodies are inherently diverse.” He takes marginalized figures and makes them the main character, normalizing them through mythological framework where abstraction and figuration merge. In doing so, he offers both refuge and revolution, worlds where queerness is not just tolerated but cosmically essential.

“Fiction is what gets us to the real world,” he explains. “Our emotions and our vulnerabilities, and understanding our humanness is what makes us so real.”

Perhaps most powerfully, Koslow finds hope in the natural world’s persistence. He recalls a late-night encounter he recently had near Lake Michigan. “I went to the woods by the lake really late at night and saw all these flashes of light from the fireflies. There were so many! It was so beautiful, and so peaceful. It felt out of place, and out of time—otherworldly. But it was real. Is real. I was having a mini-existential crisis crying at these horny fireflies that were just trying to find mates because nature is always trying to create more nature. Life is always propagating, creating more life. More beauty. More love. This is real. A real fact: Love is normal, and easy, and natural.”

This vision infuses their broader philosophy: “History doesn’t have to repeat itself. It doesn’t even have to rhyme. History can be history. And tomorrow can be brand-fucking-new. And in between today and tomorrow, maybe we find optimism. Maybe we don’t find optimism. But we do find each other. We always do. And we, like nature, create, and love, and dance, and organize, and we do our very best to survive despite insurmountable odds, simply because life is beautiful.”

Through painting, drawing, installation, and emerging technologies, Nykoli Koslow continues to build universes where the margins become the center and where worldbuilding serves as both artistic practice and survival strategy. Their work stands as a testament to the power of imagination not just to reflect reality, but to fundamentally reimagine it—confronting historical marginalization while envisioning a future that recognizes queerness as intrinsic, natural, and life-affirming.