Sofia Lacin And Hennessy Christophel
LC Studio Tutto is an art and design team composed of Sofia Lacin and Hennessy Christophel. The duo works collaboratively to create site-specific art—infusing spaces with life and identity to encourage a connection between people and their environments. The team has worked with with municipalities, architects, designers, developers, and businesses, to translate feelings and ideas into works of site-specific visual art. LC Studio Tutto has created over 75 murals, custom paintings, and interactive installations. With each project they work closely with the client to produce a piece of art that reflects its surroundings and resonates with its audience. Lacin and Christophel both grew up in Sacramento and have been friends since they were teenagers.
As a team, they bring together their individual artistic strengths to create artwork that is rooted in abstract expression while furthering a defined narrative. Sofia and Hennessy design collaboratively from their Los Angeles and Central Coast studios, and fabricate artwork together on location throughout the country. Hennessy Christophel, the daughter of an artist and a biologist, grew up with colored pencils in hand, surrounded by nature. With an interest in systems, cycles, and understanding how the world works, she looks for pattern, meaning, and story in her artwork. After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a degree in fine art, with a focus on illustration and bookmaking, she started her career in public art.
Now living in the Central Coast, Hennessy is continually inspired by the intricacies of nature and seeks to bring life and nuance to the built world. Sofia grew up in an warehouse studio, surrounded by all kinds of imaginative handmade props, shaving-cream pies, tiny figurines for miniature sets, and endless colored pencils and paper. Her parents shot and styled photographs while she created drawings and paintings backstage at the ‘stupido’. After early life in Northern California, she left to study art abroad in Florence, Italy. While in Florence, Sofia was introduced to a culture that prioritized beauty. She was taken with this visual approach to life and brought this philosophy home with her to fuel her work as a professional artist. Sofia’s expressive paintings are portraits of inner moments. Stains, dry-brush, thick and barely-there oil paint, conte crayon, and oil sticks layer with one another to create abstract worlds. Each piece is open and loose without being chaotic or out of balance. Complementing her introspective studio practice, for the last 10 years Sofia has introduced large-scale fine art to the public realm. Since co-founding LC Studio Tutto, Sofia has designed and fabricated over 75 site-specific art installations across the Country.
Each of these large-scale artworks integrate layers of her fine art paintings on canvas to introduce fine-art qualities to the everyday landscape. Handmade textures, rich colors, and brushstrokes bring movement and life to municipal water tanks, freeway over-passes, and bleak tunnels, to name a few. Sofia is currently at various stages of design and fabrication for a range projects: a mixed-media series for a Silicon Valley tech company headquarters, a three-dimensional laser-cut guardrail for a new hospital, an abstract public art piece that incorporates fiber optic light, and a fresh collection of paintings on canvas in her studio in downtown Los Angeles. Sofia graduated with a fine arts degree from the University of California, Davis with a double major in Art Studio and Italian language. After studying art and Italian in Florence, Italy for a year, she returned to establish LC Studio Tutto in 2008. They love the experience of getting to know a space from the inside out. Their process is conceptual, exploratory, and driven by curiosity. To establish a holistic vision for a space, they seek to understand its geographic context, history, and physical attributes. With this information, They create a visual narrative to harmonize with an environment and the people who frequent it. They believe in an open dialogue with our clients and the audience the art is for—after all they know the space best. This kind of collaboration is instrumental to the success of a piece. Thoughtful site-specific artwork invites a meaningful connection between people and place, and optimistically shapes the way they see ourselves and the world around us. For over 30 years, this elevated stretch of Interstate-5 has served as the shelter for California’s largest farmers market.
Their vision was to transform this anonymous concrete overpass with artwork that reflects the vibrancy and life that fills the space every Sunday morning. After input from the famers market founder and surrounding neighborhood associations, they created keywords to direct our design process: seasonal, alive, community, and cyclical.
Bright Underbelly transforms 70,000 square feet of concrete into painted blue sky and abstract branches and leaves of sycamore trees that once grew on the site.
There are four areas of the design, each representing a season. The mural transitions from the lush leaves of summer to the barren branches of winter. Between the branches you’ll discover local wildlife depicted. Encompassing the entire piece is the shimmering lunar cycle for one year.
