©KATHERINE MCMAHON
Habitat is a weekly series that visits with artists in their workspaces.
This week’s studio: Kari Cholnoky; East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Kari Cholnoky is not a minimalist. “Conceptually, I believe that more is more,” she told me. With her colorful, boisterous paintings, Cholnoky aims to examine our relationship to objects by using a wide variety of materials, like fur, polyurethane, wigs, and sex toys.
Cholnoky, 27, has been working in her Brooklyn home and studio for a year. Before moving to New York, she got her M.F.A. in painting from Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. “I really needed grad school,” she told me. “It was like a two-year monastery where I read a ton of books, made a ton of work, and asked myself a ton of questions. There’s no way I could have done it in New York City—you’re not able to take risks like you can when nobody’s paying attention.” She currently supplements her income as an artist by working as a studio assistant for painters Joe Bradley and Chris Martin.
At any given time, Cholnoky said, she is working on 10 to 15 paintings. “I’m hyperconscious when I work,” she said. “For me, painting is almost like achieving a meditative state. Yoga doesn’t work for me, but working myself to death does.” In her current body of work, she is restraining her color palette in order to experiment in other ways, like incorporating new materials and trying out unusual compositions. “When a new material comes into my practice,” she said, “I’m so enamored by it that I think its perfect just the way it is, and then after a certain amount of time, I become discontented by the rawness of the thing. It’s been three years that I’ve been using fur at this point and now the fur is basically obliterated. There used to be a softness, but that’s over.”
Cholnoky’s work is currently featured in a solo exhibition at David Klein Gallery in Detroit and will be appearing in a group exhibition curated by Melissa Brown at Safe Gallery in Brooklyn on February 19. Below, a look around Cholnoky’s workspace.
ALL PHOTOS: KATHERINE MCMAHON
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Cholnoky works with a wide variety of materials, from fur to sex toys, most of which she sources from the Internet. "My Amazon.com recommended list is truly all over the place," she said.
"I’m working on a couple books for Small Editions in Gowanus. They do handmade artist books, so one of these will be going into that show."
An in-process work in Cholnoky's studio. "The pieces I have the most trouble with that fight back the hardest are the best ones, and stuff that comes together really nicely is just really boring," she said.
"It's very stressful dropping foam onto the canvas," Cholnoky said, detailing the process of trying to achieve the right amount of industrial strength two-part mixable urethane foam, which expands 15 times in 30 seconds, on the canvas. "There have been plenty of times that I’ve just over-poured something and I've obliterated the thing I’ve worked so hard on underneath. But it’s a good studio lesson, because over and over you're taught to let stuff go."
The back of a smaller canvas. They are typically crafted using two-inch-thick foam board with a piece of plywood laminated to the back. "The good thing about using foam board is weight," she said. "It's important for me to be able to move them around on my own if I'm working all day in the studio."
A painting constructed with wigs, orange paint, and spaghetti. "I cooked the spaghetti and then mixed it with the paint," she said. "A lot of people were very concerned about the archival quality of spaghetti."
"This pillowed, weird shape was accidental," she said. "I under-mixed and it was way too shallow." Her theory is that she is sure about how materials are working about 60 percent of the time. Happy accidents get added to her "bag of tricks."
Plastic bristles, which are used in brooms. Cholnoky used to work as a fabricator of objects for the home. "On my last day of work, I asked to trade labor for materials, so I got a bunch of these before I left," she said.
"I just got this bag of fake bread. I have a surrealist bent. I’m always looking for stuff that straddles the thing between animate and inanimate, edible and destructive, body and product or machine."
"When I started grad school, I was painting on canvas," Cholnoky said. "Then I started dumpster diving for materials...I want to transform my work into something that people will see as color, form, and light first and material second. I want the viewer to be affected physically and visually first and then start picking apart the actual material elements."
