Contemporary Artists Consider and Create Landscape in Pasadena Museum of California Art Exhibition

Lloyd Hamrol, Study for Overflow, 2015. Industrial felt. Courtesy of the Artist; Joan Perlman, Untitled [detail], 2015. Gouache on Yupo, 9 x 12 inches. Courtesy of the Artist

The Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA) is proud to present Lloyd Hamrol/Joan Perlman: “a sky in the palm of a hand.” On view in the PMCA’s Back Gallery, the exhibition pairs Lloyd Hamrol’s site-specific, industrial felt sculptures and Joan Perlman’s abstract paintings and prints, creating an immersive, multimedia environment that provides a platform to consider the related ideas and sharp distinctions between two artists’ investigations of materials, processes, impermanence, and landscape.

Though Hamrol and Perlman have an ongoing, collegial dialogue, the two Los Angeles-based artists have never exhibited together. “A sky in the palm of a hand,” the title of which is taken from W.S. Merwin’s poem “No Shadow” and alludes to the conundrum of reconciling intimacy and distance as well as the ephemerality of observable moments and entities, brings together new, large-scale works by both artists.

With over thirty site-specific public works throughout the United States, including installations at Caltech, Staples Center, and University of Iowa, Hamrol remains tied to the Earth art movement that has paralleled his career. The biomorphic works created specifically for this exhibition form a bridge between Hamrol’s public works and his small-scale sculptures. They proceed from the artist’s ten-year experimentation with industrial felt as a sculpture medium. Integrating the directness of drawing with dimensional form-building, his sculptures are draped, rather than secured or pinned, allowing for mutability. During the course of the exhibition, the artist will reconfigure one of the floor-based pieces, Overflow, at regular intervals. Both works flow with gravity and the weight of the felt, although the other piece, Cascade, ascends a corner wall of the gallery, its verticality inhabiting the wall space of Perlman’s abstracted landscapes.

Like Hamrol, Perlman embraces landscape as source and subject and examines the complex relationship between culture and nature. Her approximately ten monoprints and six expansive acrylic paintings also unfold intuitively, a process inspired by the primary energy and evolution of geological forces and fostered by a two-decade engagement with the landscape of the far North. Working from close-up sections of her own and others’ aerial photographs and video of Iceland’s glacial meltwaters and vast terrains, Perlman explores the mutating relationship of land, water, ice, and gravity in a changing climate. The resulting expanses of space, light, and color are void of a sense of scale and compel the viewer to observe her multi-layered artworks as one would—or should—their natural counterparts, taking time to create a sense of familiarity and place out of the unknown.

Though crafted in separate environments and through independent processes, the two- and three-dimensional works in “a sky in the palm of a hand” coalesce and create a landscape of their own, one that allows audiences to explore and discover, as both artists do in natural environments and through experimental processes, self-examination, and continued conversation. The works exist between captured moment and disintegration, reminding viewers of the imperative to look closely and observe fleeting space and time in order to discover what lies before us and inside us.

Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA), 490 East Union Street, Pasadena, (626) 568-3665 or visit pmcaonline.org.