In Fragile Familiar, Lapin offers a deeply personal homage to the landscape of Southern California—a terrain shaped as much by light and memory as by earth and sky. Drawing on her long-standing interest in visual perception, art history, and the natural world, Lapin paints the terrains she knows intimately: sun-washed hillsides, desert plateaus, tangled brush, vast urban spaces, and endless skies rendered in radiant layers of color and form.

Drawn from an intimate, emotional response to her environment, these new paintings reflect a shift toward immediacy and presence in the artist’s exploration of landscape. “This particular patch of California light and warmth has lured millions of people, myself included, reluctantly, uncertainly, to its promise,” she writes. “There is an ever-present tension between the land and what we build here, where the same sun that beckons one day makes us feel the fragility of our footing the next.”