OPENING RECEPTION
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2026
5-8 PM

ON VIEW
OCTOBER 23 - NOVEMBER 21, 2026

FOR INQUIRES
Please contact hello@chefasprojects.com

Chefas Projects is pleased to present Beyond the Garden Room, a group exhibition curated by abstract artist Kristen Diederich. Drawing inspiration from the late Gothic Unicorn Tapestries, the exhibition explores the garden as both a physical space and an imaginative construct, considering how nature is cultivated, contained, and understood through the environments we create.

In the Unicorn Tapestries, more than a hundred plant species appear in a state of perpetual bloom, depicting an idealized world of abundance and timelessness that nature itself cannot sustain. This vision serves as a point of departure for Diederich, who reimagines the gallery as a garden room: a cultivated environment in which the works of seven artists gather like distinct species within a shared landscape.

Through this framework, Beyond the Garden Room considers the boundaries that define a garden, asking what is welcomed within its borders and what remains outside them. The exhibition reflects on the relationships between cultivation and wildness, order and growth, and the visible and overlooked. By drawing attention to what is carefully tended alongside what remains uncultivated, the exhibition suggests that what exists beyond established boundaries can be as significant as what is deliberately shaped and maintained.

The participating artists approach these questions through distinct material practices, personal histories, and imaginative worlds. Their work engages with landscape, memory, identity, materiality, and the structures, both natural and constructed, that shape how we inhabit and interpret our surroundings.

ARTISTS

Kayla Marie Carlson (b. 1991) is a painter, writer, and designer raised in the Midwest and based in Portland, Oregon. Her work explores the ongoing search for personal identity through storytelling, narrative, and connections with the natural world. Drawing on landscapes, dreams, fantasy, nostalgia, mythology, fables, magical realism, songwriting, and poetry, Carlson translates the emotional resonances of these influences into visual compositions. Through layered textures, color, organic forms, and expressive mark-making, her paintings create whimsical and poetic spaces where the boundaries between reality and fiction, and the natural and fabricated, begin to dissolve.

Kaitlyn Carr (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses site-specific installations, block prints, and sculptural cutouts made from industrial and unconventional materials. She earned a BFA in printmaking from Oregon State University in 2016 and currently works in the architectural industry. Both disciplines inform her interest in repetition, modularity, and sensitivity to site. Carr investigates how individual units accumulate into larger gestures, revealing relationships between parts and wholes. Working with materials such as inkjet-coated DuPont Tyvek, hand-printed Reemay, unfired clay slip, and powder-coated stainless steel, she combines unconventional processes with a rigorous exploration of material and form. Her work is held in the Portable Collection of Kent Parks, Recreation, and Community Services in Washington and the Provost’s Purchase Award Collection at Oregon State University.

C. Meier (American, b. 1982) is a nonbinary artist and curator based in Portland, Oregon. Their practice explores materiality through hybrid processes that combine drawing and photographic methods. Meier received an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2017 and a BFA in Studio Art from Pacific Lutheran University in 2004. Their work has been exhibited at Solas Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Mana Contemporary in Chicago, Blue Sky, Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, Filter Space, and The Neon Heater, among other venues. Their work is included in the permanent collection of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. Meier has also curated and co-curated exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and Medium Photo in San Diego. They currently serve as Exhibitions Director at Blue Sky, Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts.

Quinha Mukai Faria (b. 1988, Campinas, Brazil) is an artist working across painting, sculpture, and installation. Her practice is informed by years spent at the hospital bedside and an ongoing investigation into the relationships between bodily, material, and social systems. Drawing on her training in human physiology, emergency medical care, and custom tailoring, Faria works with provisional materials sourced from the infrastructures of everyday life. Her work examines how bodies interact with, adapt to, and are shaped by the systems around them. Faria received an MFA from Bard College in 2025 and holds a BS in Nursing from the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in Human Physiology from the University of Oregon. Her work has been exhibited at Kiang Malingue in New York, Art Basel Hong Kong, Asian Arts Initiative, Vox Populi, Mural Arts in Philadelphia, Carnation Contemporary, and One Grand Gallery in Portland.

Indigo Free (b. 1996, Petrolia, California) is an oil painter living and working on Orcas Island, Washington. Her paintings explore memories and dreams altered by time, held within the subconscious and reemerging in unexpected moments of clarity. Guided by a meditative and intuitive process, Free embraces patience and the relinquishing of control as essential elements of her practice. Having begun painting in childhood without formal training, she uses the medium to investigate the contours of an unconventional, geographically isolated upbringing marked by solitude, inward reflection, and self-directed learning. Her work considers how personal experience persists, transforms, and resurfaces over time.

Holly Osborne explores landscapes and scenes across diverse geographic and cultural contexts, from the wild countryside of Portugal and the formal vistas of France to the spontaneous arrangements encountered on walks through North Portland. Her paintings celebrate the distinctive natural and cultural aesthetics of each setting, attending to the varied ways a place can be experienced and interpreted. Working through a fluid, improvisational process, Osborne balances intentional composition with spontaneous expression. She welcomes unexpected marks, colors, and abstractions as they emerge, allowing each painting to evolve while retaining a connection to her original vision. Her practice embraces the tension between observation and invention, finding possibilities in both carefully considered structures and unplanned encounters.

Emily Wise (b. 1988) was born and raised between upstate New York and Baltimore, Maryland. She received a BFA in Painting from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, where she currently lives and works. Driven by questions of femininity, intimacy, and the mysteries of the natural world, Wise paints carefully posed figures amid surreal flora, employing unexpected fluorescent colors to both surprise and disarm. Beneath their vibrant surfaces, her paintings construct layered narratives of women developing relationships with themselves and one another in spaces suspended between waking life and dreams. Drawing on classical mythology, poetry, personal memory, and imaginative storytelling, Wise brings together disparate references—from the Pleiades to Celtic banshee lore—to explore emotional connection, feminine identity, and the possibility of sacred space. Rather than simply illustrating stories, her paintings open imaginative worlds in which women exist on their own terms, blending the familiar with the fantastic. Wise’s work has been featured in Juxtapoz and Artsy and exhibited in Portland, Los Angeles, and New York. In 2024, she was named a shortlist finalist for The Hopper Prize. She is represented by Chefas Projects.

Kristen Diederich, the exhibition’s curator and a practicing abstract artist, brings these diverse practices into conversation through the conceptual framework of the garden room. In Beyond the Garden Room, the gallery becomes a cultivated landscape where individual artistic voices coexist without losing their distinct identities. The exhibition’s organizing premise invites viewers to consider not only what is gathered and nurtured within a defined space, but also what falls beyond its borders.

Together, the artists offer varied perspectives on the environments we inhabit, the systems we construct, and the stories through which we make sense of the world. Like the idealized landscape of the Unicorn Tapestries, the garden room evokes an image of carefully assembled abundance while acknowledging the limits of any cultivated environment. What is gathered, what is excluded, and what grows beyond the frame all become part of the exhibition’s broader inquiry into the spaces we make and the worlds they allow us to imagine.

ARTWORK

INSTALLATION IMAGES

© CHEFAS PROJECTS
Photo credit: Mario Gallucci