Uppercut is an exhibition which includes work from artists Sophie Isaak, Isaiah Jones, Kalyn Fay Barnoski, Maryam Amirvaghefi, and Katharen Wiese.

While their work focuses on various themes, the threads which connect them are storytelling, memory, resilience, contemporary craft, empathy, conflict, and rage. They defy the oppressive power structures of patriarchy, colonization, and societal convention. The work is pointed, doesn’t shy away from honesty or confrontation, and buries fear. When striking with an uppercut, you leave yourself open to be struck hard if not delivered correctly. This move requires total commitment. Do we risk dangerous exposure when we open ourselves? Or is a moment of vulnerability the optimal time to strike?

Isaiah Jones was raised in the mountains of western North Carolina. She received a MFA in Printmaking from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in May of 2021. Working primarily with text, Jones utilizes traditional printmaking, quilting, language, and storytelling to create individual prints and large-scale installations. Her work investigates love, desire, isolation, self hatred, and the act of observation. Jones lives and works in Western North Carolina.

Maryam Amirvaghefi (b. 1989, Tehran, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist working with mixed media, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, handmade papers, and a range of experimental materials. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and a BFA from Sooreh University in Tehran, Iran. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Contemporary Istanbul Art Fair (Turkey), CICA Museum (South Korea), Mey Gallery (Los Angeles), and Bavan Gallery (Iran), among others. Amirvaghefi’s art has been featured in publications including n+1 Magazine, Dovetail Magazine, AL-TIBA Art Magazine, The Magenta Publication, Studio Visit Magazine, and Average Art Magazine. She currently lives and works in the United States. 
As a woman born and raised in Iran, I carry within me the weight of countless quiet battles— fought at home, in studios, on the streets, and within institutions that were never built for us. My work emerges from this space of tension: between what is offered to women and what we must fight to claim. Through painting, ceramics, handmade papers, and mixed materials, I explore the visibility and erasure of women—especially those navigating the cultural and political landscapes of the Middle East. My practice is rooted in the experience of constantly having to ask for permission: to speak, to move, to create, to exist. And in that asking, I’ve learned that the act of making can itself be an act of defiance. Part of my work engages with women in the realm of sports, another public space shaped by restriction and surveillance. But it’s not about sports alone—it’s about access, autonomy, and the right to occupy space. Whether it’s a woman holding a brush or training on a field, she is demanding more than representation—she is insisting on presence. As an immigrant woman, I have come to understand that the fight doesn’t end when you cross a border. The landscape changes, but the negotiations remain—sometimes quieter, sometimes hidden in microaggressions or in the weight of being constantly “othered.” The struggle to be seen and heard continues in new ways, and so does the need to create as a form of resilience and reclamation. In Iran, a woman painting an apple is not a neutral act. It is a quiet, radical statement—a refusal to disappear. In each of my works, I aim to capture that spirit of persistence: of being seen, being heard, and being here. My work is a record of resistance, a gesture of solidarity, and a tribute to those who continue, against all odds, to push forward.

Kalyn Fay Barnoski (b. 1990, Cherokee Nation enrollee, Muscogee Creek descent) is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, curator, and educator from Oklahoma. Centering Indigenous and decolonial methodologies, their work focuses on self-location, community-building, collaboration, and empathy through the use of music, publication, storytelling, and contemporary craft.  In every endeavor, they see their practice as a way to find the ways in which we all intersect and to build bridges of understanding between. Their practice is “for you, for me, for us, for we.” 

Kalyn Fay Barnoski holds an M.F.A. from University of Arkansas (2021),  an M.A. from The University of Tulsa (2016), and a B.F.A. from Rogers State University (2012). Kalyn has worked with Peabody Essex Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, Gilcrease Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Momentary, Eiteljorg Museum, along with others, and performed, exhibited, and facilitated workshops both nationally and internationally.

Katharen Wiese is a multidisciplinary artist from Lincoln, NE, residing in New Haven, Connecticut. She holds a B.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (2018) and an MFA from Yale University (2024). Wiese is a Community-Engaged Teaching Fellow at the University of New Haven (24’ – 26’) and an Artist in Residence at the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop (24’ – 26’). Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Chilli Art Projects (London), SPURS Gallery (Beijing), the Yale Peabody Natural History Museum (New Haven), Yossi Milo Gallery (New York) , David Castillo Gallery (Miami), the Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum (Iowa), and Toshkova Fine Art Advisory (Durham, NC).

My great grandmother was a farmer and a quilter. Old work clothes, fragments of Sunday dresses, and tired linens, created cover for her children. Like many black quilters from Alabama, she used the materials at hand, forming a patchwork of expression and survival. Situated in my experience of dualities as a biracial black Nebraskan, the patchwork is a primary form holding the simultaneity of subject positions, perspectives and histories. I question the meaning of disciplinary boundaries. For me this began with questioning the painting substrate -canvas- as a textile. Through painting, quilting and bricolage I evoke the animate histories of inanimate objects: engaging the actualities of commodity culture through a racial and environmental lens. The portrait and the landscape are at the heart of my practice, as is the ever shifting relationship between the individual and the places they find themselves. My recent work in the studio stemmed from an interest in the history of the Brown Bag Test, cotton, and cardboard as a site of product movement. By constructing cardboard with cotton pulp, kraft paper, and pages of the Negro Traveler’s Green Book, these new substrates speaks to interwoven histories of products, people and land. Drawing from archival research, my work is driven by a negotiation of histories and lived experience. Growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, a small predominantly white city surrounded by cornfields, monocultural landscapes were an agricultural and demographic reality. In my work, agricultural topographies are material and conceptual, denoting both the human and the ecosystem. 

Sophie Isaak was born in Boston, Massachusetts. After graduating from the University of Vermont with a degree in English and Studio Art, Isaak went on to receive an MA and MFA in Printmaking from the University of Iowa. 

My work is bound to intense colors, awkward and surprising forms, and idiosyncratic compositions. I utilize printmaking techniques, as well as drawing and painting, to convey spaces that are simultaneously intriguing and frightening. Explorations into the grand forces that propel the world, good and evil and drama arose from my early love of John Steinbeck and the Old Testament. My fascination with the melodrama of narrative led to pop culture obsessions with Law and Order and the Real Housewives franchises. Instead of expressing these interests through traditional narrative structure, I create wildly shifting plots through intense and often very wrong-feeling color choices. Interest in mood, emotion and chaos arose from my attempts to understand the completely paradoxical nature of the world. How is it possible that I can love and hate the same thing simultaneously? How can I be so good and so bad? Why do I want something and then try to tear it apart? I harness forces of good and evil, beauty and repulsiveness, happiness and sadness, attraction and repulsion, to convey scenes as tumultuous as both the world around me and my own shifting moods. I portray this shift through cropping imagery, color or medium shifts, and scale changes. By pushing two opposite elements next to each other I hope to reveal how disparate energies cohabit the same plane. These disruptions are meant to take the work to an unpredictable conclusion while confounding the viewer. I want people to question whether they are still having fun, or if things have taken an irreversible dark turn. I am inspired by the short stories of George Saunders and Carmen Maria Machado. Both writers utilize satire, horror, fantasy and humor with a fluency that can be jarring. The stories often seamlessly shift between the universes of tragedy and comedy. I am inspired by this shift and the feeling of surprise when the reality of a narrative is altered suddenly. The atmosphere of anticipation and anxiety is one that I try to imbue into my two dimensional work. In a non-representational manner, I seek to illustrate changes in mood and force the viewer to grapple with visual disruptions. Bright colors and silly bulbous forms serve as a counterpoint to the gloom and doom of the world. Color is my most prized tool that betrays my urgent emotions when making. I also see my devotion to unapologetic color and uncomfortable compositional choices as a feminist choice. Women are often told that we are “too much” or “overly emotional”, I seek to wade directly into these characterizations and revel in them. I have always been attracted to the gaudy, ornamental and decorative. This attraction can be traced to my mother’s tastes. In our household mixing patterns was commonplace and my mother willfully ignored choosing a standard palette. In David Batchelor’s Chromophobia, he describes Western society’s aversion to color, “If colour is a cosmetic, it is also—and again—coded as feminine. Colour is a supplement, but it is also, potentially, a seduction” (52). I seek to wade into these negative connotations. I like the idea of color being a cheap trick, simply artifice and ornament. I seek to build compositions from oppositional patterns, forms and various print and drawing mediums. My most recent work sprung from feeling removed from the world during the pandemic, job transitions, and moving states. I was inspired by an interview with painter Joanne Greenbaum wherein she discusses the personal and free space of her studio. Greenbaum explains how she works without limits and allows herself to make work that may feel “embarrassing” at first. This phrase has stuck with me and allowed me to make visual moves that may initially feel wrong or ill-intentioned. Isolation emboldened me to create work purely for the pleasure derived from making. These personal and contradictory works are driven by a compulsive need to decorate. The rigor of creation and laborious repetition serve both as tools of survival and relaxation.