BIO
Karolena Kuhn completed her BFA in Sculpture and Expanded Media at Cleveland Institute of art in 2016. There she has received the Gund Family Scholarship, Reinberger Gallery Purchase award, as well as the Bernice and David E. Davis ’48 Scholarship for excellence in Sculpture. She completed her studies with a 4.0 gpa.
In 2015 she has shown work in various exhibitions throughout Cleveland including Cleveland Institute of Arts 69th annual Student Independent Exhibition, Slavic Village’s Rooms to Let and Case Western reserves thinkbox opening "In Awe and Terror".. Karolena was also a student panelist for Socially Engaged Artists for Change during Cleveland Institute of Art’s Lunch on Fridays.Between 2016 and 2018 she participated in various group exhibitions including one at The Church a temporary art gallery located on Superior in downtown Cleveland. She had her first solo show at No Place gallery located in Columbus ohio In August of 2016. In 2017 Her work was featured among 4 other artist at 78th street studios in the show Thought Vacation.
Most recently her work was shown in the Cleveland Institute of Arts juried alumni exhibition, There's no basement at the Alamo. It included the works of 25 CIA alumni. There she received an award for her painting titled "Fast food desert Smiley Face Prison". The show went on to be written about by the Plain Dealer as a show that "hits the eye like a tall cool drink on a hot summer day."
"Fast Food Desert Smiley Face Prison" 2019
Karolena Kuhn (b.1993) is a first-generation Polish-American sculpture and expanded media artist whose practice moves between material and digital realms. Working across sculpture, experimental video, painting, drawing, fiber arts, and sound design, she integrates traditional processes with CGI to translate intangible systems into embodied form.
Her work draws from invisible networks of perception, nature, the human spirit,media, and subconscious imagery. Rendering them physically through immersive installation. Uncanny furniture and anthropomorphic plant forms populate these spaces, constructing liminal environments that feel both familiar and dislocated.
Treating the screen as a contemporary oracle, Kuhn reclaims it as a site of reflection rather than passive consumption. Projection-mapped imagery and handcrafted elements converge to form “domestic temples”—environments that suspend viewers between states of awareness.Between the natural and material these spaces function as a kind of psychological waiting room, where entertainment, identity, and perception can be observed rather than absorbed.
Through a practice grounded in both technical rigor and intuitive construction, Kuhn engages the tension between collective systems and individual experience. Her work draws from a media-saturated visual culture while exposing its underlying structures—highlighting how aesthetics operate as rituals that shape desire, belief, memory, and consumption.
By contrasting the emptiness of the quantum world with the expressive nature of human consciousness, Kuhn positions her work as a translation device: making the invisible tangible, and the conceptual experiential. A point of translation—where diffuse systems of potential are condensed into lived, perceptible form. The interplay between glowing digital surfaces and physical forms reflects a broader inquiry into the illusion of paradise within the contemporary American dream—revealing it as both constructed and consumable.
Contact
Dreamescape studios #115
1900 e. superior ave.
Cleveland. Ohio
44114