Mapping the Margin

About

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.

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.