Uprise Art is pleased to present Mapping the Margin, an exhibition featuring new work by Fitzhugh Karol, Kit Porter, and Carla Weeks.

Organic portals and sloping stepped shapes are hallmarks of Karol’s practice. Working across a range of media from paper, clay, and wood, to monumentally-scaled steel, Karol is interested in translating his experience of the natural world into pictographic symbols. His Wings series is a suite of wall-based works that translate his recurring motifs into collage-like relief sculptures. By combining iconography that usually exists in his practice on their own, the artist has created new relationships between the forms, with the contrast in color, texture, and elevation mimicking the diversity of the landscape.

In Porter’s newest paintings, the artist introduces transparency, with thinned washes of paint that offer an aqueous contrast to her more sharply defined forms. These paintings chart the allegorical resonance of nature as it relates to human agency. Porter’s fragmented flowers and foliage appear carved, softened and shaped from the outside, formed by the space in which they grow. They allude to life altered by its natural environment, and nature altered by the people who inhabit it.

In 'Mapping the Margin' each artist depicts forms where the environment and space between them are as important as the symbols themselves.

Weeks’ calendrical oil paintings feature moon-like orbs that hover across the linen surface. Partially shielded by transparent layers of ultramarine and indanthrone, her works examine the grid as a record of passing time. The recurring patterns of geometric forms create a peaceful predictability that mimics the persistent progression of day and night. Each work possesses a richness from the variance in the artist’s hand, the mark of a more heavily saturated brush, the wavering perimeter of a circle, and the rhythmic scumbling of pigment, as evidence and record of process.

The outermost silhouette or outline of a leaf is called the margin. In Fitzhugh Karol’s works, the iconographic vocabulary of silhouettes converge into a visual language. In Kit Porter’s paintings, the margin between form and environment is blurred and questioned. The mapping of the moons, outlines, and shapes in Carla Week’s works draws attention to the human desire to create purpose from, and seek order in, nature. In Mapping the Margin each artist depicts forms where the environment and space between them are as important as the symbols themselves.

Carla Weeks (b. 1985) is an Arrowsic, Maine-based artist using abstraction to articulate the subtleties and nuance of sensory memory. In Carla’s work, color, line, and form function as glyphs to navigate through the physical and emotional experience of place. Carla’s quiet reflections on the immateriality of memory are a testament to her commitment to careful looking, feeling and existing within the present moment.

Fitzhugh Karol (b. 1982) is a Brooklyn, New York-based sculptor whose work ranges from large scale outdoor installations to intimate tabletop adornments. Working in metal, wood and ceramic, Fitzhugh’s sculptures mix angular and organic geometries inspired by real and fabricated archaeological records, music, childhood and minimalism. Fitzhugh’s sculptures activate the space they inhabit whether they are installed in a natural landscape or positioned on a shelf at home.

Kit Porter (b. 1983) is a mixed media artist living and working in Beaufort, South Carolina. Drawn to the coastal landscape, Porter’s paintings abstract and fragment natural forms to act as a metaphor for the fragility of the physical world. In Porter’s paintings, tide-worn shells and stones polished by the ocean’s current become as smooth as petals while flowers become as ephemeral as the wind, echoing the persistence of time and the tenacity of nature.