As New York City finally reclines into lovely gallery-walking weather, a hypnotic two-person exhibition has emerged from Uprise Art to greet us. The Laura Naples and Katrine Hildebrandt-Hussey exhibition, “Passing Through,” offers two distinct but aligned approaches to image-making grounded in attention to materials, presence, and The Unseen that pass through and by us every moment. As I walked through the exhibition, I was reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem “Flare,” in which she writes,
“the poem wants to flower, like a flower. It knows that much. It wants to open itself, like the door of a little temple, so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed, and less yourself than part of everything.”
The longer one spends with the work, the more our perception softens, and we begin to sense that the artists (and the artwork) may be much like “a poem” that is “like a flower.” The work recognizes an intuitive knowing that sits at the edges of our reality, open to us when we are ready to seek its shelter.
Laura Naples’ paintings start from a place of emptiness. Not in a negative sense, but in the way a dance might begin with a deep breath and ground to move. She works on the floor, using diluted acrylics to build compositions in transparent layers. In her recent work, subtle hues of stormy grey and white flow freely inside unfurling forms. Wet pigment pools into itself, drying into subtle gradients, punctuated with bubbling pearlescent gasps of ivory. Her process is physical and grounded in gesture. With a background in dance and calligraphy, she thinks in terms of extension and retraction, alignment and balance, and embodied rhythm. There is no fixed image in mind when she begins, only the openness to what might emerge.
Naples describes her work as a type of sensory contemplation. As an energetically sensitive artist, it’s not just the music she listens to or the presence of her studiomates, but even the fit of her clothing or a scent blowing in her studio window that can impact her work. Her current studio routine begins with a meditation accessing the “infinite expanse of the heart.” This language might read as airy esotericism, but the resulting paintings feel grounded and specific. Her paintings don’t represent the spiritual but rather document her participation in it.
Much of Naples’ practice is about resonance. What happens when an artist moves in alignment with something beyond their conscious will? What does it feel like to harmonize with a form, rather than impose one? Her use of transparent washes makes space for the viewer to enter the image slowly. Each layer leaves evidence of what came before. There’s a tenderness in that, and a sense of trust in the unknown (or perhaps in a kind of blooming knowledge).
While Naples’ work emerges from fluid movement and atmospheric layering, Hildebrandt-Hussey’s process is more tactile, grounded in the physical labor of transformation and time. Working from a home studio in Massachusetts, the artist makes her own paper and pigments, drawing from materials sourced in her immediate environment. For this exhibition, many of the works began with a batch of recycled paper made from her two sons’ discarded homework. She shredded, boiled, strained, and reformed these pages into new surfaces, transforming them into landing pads for new ideas.
Hildebrandt-Hussey incorporates natural dyes collected from her garden, kitchen, and compost. She’s not aiming for the control of a manufactured synthetic dye. Her interest lies in the recognition of a color and material as its own entity that one can come to know and respect, given enough close consideration by the artist. Color and texture become tied to season, to weather, to the time of day a plant was harvested. This sensitivity to timing gives her work an inherent rhythm.
Circles appear often, sometimes as dyed fabric sewn to the drawing, sometimes as scorched lines scarring the paper. These recurring shapes map cycles of light and growth, domestic repetition, and family life. They’re compositional elements, but they also feel like notations, as searing marks underline moments in a larger narrative of Hildebrandt-Hussey’s life. The work is deeply integrated into that life. Nothing is treated as separate—not the materials, not the process, not the lives that intersect it. Her children assist in the paper-making (her sons ask excitedly when they get to shred their math tests); her husband brings home wood scraps; she collects lint, and meal remnants. Each of these things, seemingly inconsequential, is reconsidered. In doing so, Hildebrandt-Hussey gives weight to the unnoticed labor of domestic life. Her process doesn’t reject the home—it brings the home into the studio, and allows it to shape her work.
As New York heats up, with both a summer set to be the hottest on record and a closely watched mayoral primary, Uprise Art seems to have made a conscious decision to create a space for cool reflection. Following the conceptual through-line of the Scott Sueme solo exhibition earlier this year, “Passing Through” doubles down on our collective need to practice radical presence. Artists Laura Napes and Katrine Hildebrandt-Hussey show us by example that we must remain open; like a poem, like a flower, so that we may also be little cooling temples. This is not an exhibition about arrival. It’s about process, permeability, and the quiet intelligence that lives inside materials if we stay with them long enough.
