Two Painters features the recent work of two studio artists at Chashama’s Matawan Studios.

About the Artists

Myke Karlowski is a visual artist based in New Jersey, whose introspective work draws upon personal experiences and the passage of time through the manipulation of color and various media. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, where he studied painting. He received a 2022 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He attended the 2022 Summer Residency at the School of Visual Arts, as well as other residencies including: the Art Student’s League of New York’s League Residency at Vytlacil, and the Horned Dorset Colony in Leonardsville, NY. He was a visiting artist a Yale-NUS College, Singapore, where he designed stage and visual concepts for the performance “Wassily Kandinsky’s: The Yellow Sound”. He also designed the stage installation for the music performance “When Apathy is Betrayal”, in collaboration with composer Nirmali Fenn, at Stony Brook University. Recent exhibitions include “Time As Color” and “9 Month 2 Seasons” presented by Chashama. Myke Karlowski documents his daily life using color as a visual language. Through a system of color-coding, informed by his own experiences of synesthesia, his work translates numbers, letters, personalities, events, units and moments in time into unique color formations. Considering his work a journal of lived experiences, he expresses these fragments of time through various media, whether two-dimensional, sculptural, or site-specific.

For more information on Myke visit his website and follow him on Instagram.

Donna Kessinger is an abstract painter with a love for experimental video, focusing on feminism and LGBTQ+ herstories. She has worked in museums, NYC based as well as rural and urban New Jersey, and has run artist spaces since the mid-nineties. She has a passion for creating programs around inclusion, social justice and diversity. She has recently engaged in creating art exhibitions programs with adults who are on the autism spectrum. An advocate for the concept of the museum as a healing space that works to bring community together, she works as curator, visual arts producer, educator, and arts advocate. . She has produced several independent curatorial projects in New York and New Jersey since 1999. Kessinger has functioned as a producer of emerging artist residency programs at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, in New York City, Aljira A Space for Contemporary Art, in Newark and ChaShaMa Space to Present and Create Gallery and Studios in Matawan, New Jersey. She is a shy painter who loves wax medium and has recorded many hours of short, oral herstories on ancient videotape from the 90’s, including Nancy Spero, Carolee Schneemann and Kate Millett.

For more information on Donna visit her website.

detail of work by Myke Karlowsai

press clippings

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Two Painters Myke Karlowski and Donna Kessinger