Artists Lloyd Hamrol and Joan Perlman will be conversing about their joint exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, “a sky in the palm of a hand,” on Saturday, November 12, starting at 3 p.m., on Artists’ Talk: Permeating Impermanence.
Hamrol and Perlman will speak about the inspiration behind their practices, and how they get from inspiration to finished artwork.
In their joint exhibition, Hamrol’s large-scale felt sculptures and Perlman’s abstract paintings and prints provide a platform to consider the shared ideas and sharp distinctions between two artists’ investigations of materials, process, impermanence, and landscape.
Taken from a line in the W.S. Merwin poem “No Shadow,” the exhibition’s title alludes to the conundrum of reconciling intimacy and distance as well as the ephemerality of observable moments and entities.
Hamrol, born in 1937 in San Francisco, says he went from graduate school at UCLA in 1963, “straight into Minimalism, Jack Kennedy’s assassination (the prelude to Vietnam) and the intellectual seedbed of the feminist movement,” which he says had a considerable impact on his philosophical outlook.
“By 1965 I was trying to integrate reductive structures, androgynous imagery and social utility, but never succeeded in getting more than two out of three together at any one time,” he writes. “Consequently, the work swung back and forth across an arc of interests defined on one end by discrete objects and on the other by transitory collaborative events.”
Later on, he says “somewhere in the center of all this, as though in an effort to balance two extremes,” he developed a body of static, architecturally defined installations which foretold the permanent landscape site projects he was to focus on later, in the ’70s and ’80s.
Perlman, New York born and now a Los Angeles resident, finished her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with highest honors at the California College of the Arts in Oakland, and then went on to graduate with a Master’s in Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Before the joint exhibit with Hamrol in Pasadena, Perlman’s latest solo exhibitions were at the Galleri Klaustur, Gallerí Klaustur, Skriðuklaustur Museum in Iceland, and The Niche at the Fine Arts Library at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 2013; and at Fringe Exhibitions in Los Angeles in 2008.
Cost for Artists’ Talk on Saturday is free with admission. For more information, call (626) 568-3665 or visit www.pmcaonline.org/programs/permeating-impermanence.
The Pasadena Museum of California Art is located at 490 E. Union Street in Pasadena.
