Kari Cholnoky & Martha Mysko

Run, Redux, Rich, Rest, Remembered. Like how John Updike writes about the grimier side of Americanism through his Rabbit novels, Kari Cholnoky and Martha Mysko burst open the facade of the American middle class through new paintings and installation at Small Editions.

Brightly crusted paintings hang off the walls—evidence of Kari Cholnoky’s actively grotesque/erotic working process. Giving each painting a thick painted skin, Cholnoky creates an physicality that elicits an physical reaction the viewer. As Sara Rose Sharp writes in her article for Hyperallergic, Cholnoky’s “creations are the gregarious partygoers that break into conversations, down your drink, and send echoing laughter around the gallery.” While her paintings intrigue with their bright, lumpy primitivism, their darker insides seem to bubble out of acrylic fur layers through fleshlight orifices.

The rear of Small Editions’ gallery is transformed by Martha Mysko’s installation of abject consumption. A surrealist computer desktop landscape lays the groundwork for Mysko’s dreamworld—a fractured domestic mindscape. Her use of sweet pastel colors combined with the glossy detritus of youth consumerism create a sense of longing for more—an American pastime.

Both artists works vibrate with the pent up energy of an American sense of urgency and consumption. The type of energy that comes from a long history of repression brought back to the surface.

Kari Cholnoky (b. 1988) received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2014. She was an artist in residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2014) and at INSTINC in Singapore (2012). Cholnoky has exhibited throughout the United States, and in Berlin and Singapore.

Martha Mysko (b. 1982) received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan in 2011. She was an artist in residence at The Homestead AK in Alaska (2009) and Takt Kunstprojektraum in Berlin (2008). Mysko has exhibited throughout the United States, and in Austria and Germany. She has a concurrent exhibition at West 10th Window, Art in Buildings, Time Equities Inc., New York, NY. The artist currently lives and works in Detroit, MI.