Kat Hutter and Roger Lee, Study for Another California Day, 2015. Courtesy of the Artists. Photo © JUCO
Kat Hutter and Roger Lee, Studies for Another California Day, 2015. Courtesy of the Artists. Photo © JUCO
The Pasadena Museum of California Art (PMCA) is proud to present Kat Hutter and Roger Lee: Another California Day, a mixed-media installation created for the PMCA’s Project Room, by painter Kat Hutter and ceramicist Roger Lee. On view April 17, 2016-September 11, 2016. Inspired by the rugged, scenic beauty of the state, the artists present a deconstructed and abstracted vision of the quintessential California landscape. This unprecedented collaboration is an intersection of the artists’ independent practices, their photographic explorations of California, and their combined endeavor K&R, through which they produce carefully-crafted and glazed ceramic wares.
What began as an informal, photographic documentary of the beauty surrounding the husband and wife duo in their daily life and travels through the state—photos of Tahoe, Santa Barbara, Griffith Park overlooking Los Angeles, many posted on Instagram as #anothercaliforniadayproject—became the impetus for the PMCA project. The installation provides a sensory experience, a three-dimensional simulation of the artists’ interpretation of the allure and uniqueness found in every California day. Created and installed onsite over a period of about one week, each day will be spent on a different aspect of the project, acknowledging the process and physical labor involved in translating a point of inspiration or idea into an object or space.
Hutter’s murals, painted directly on the gallery walls, feature an overlapping teardrop-shape that is organic and minimal. The form is variously reminiscent of leaves, shells, and beetles, amongst other flora and fauna. Her colors are directly excerpted from the California landscape, the cool blues of the ocean and sky contrast with the burnt reds, oranges, and peach of the sunset. Set against the backdrop of Hutter’s mural paintings, Lee’s three dimensional forms, composed of wet, bare, unfired clay—which will shrink, crack, and crumble as time passes—are loosely inspired by the succulents and cacti of the California desert. Sensual and earthly, the raw clay mimics both the terrain of the land as well as that of the human body. Together, the artists present a pure and elemental portrait of the state that inspires everything they do.
Kat Hutter and Roger Lee: Another California Day is an unchartered, distinctive combination of media that considers the intersections of natural and created environments, beauty and the work that makes it possible. The exhibition is organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art.
Pasadena Museum of California Art, 490 E Union St., Pasadena, (626) 568-3665 or visit www.pmcaonline.org.
