KRISTEN DIEDERICH
OUTSIDE NATURE

OCTOBER 23 - NOVEMBER 21, 2026

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 Outside Nature, an exhibition of paintings and works by Kristen Diederich, on view October 23 through November 21, 2026. The exhibition opens with a reception on Friday, October 23, from 5 to 8 PM.

Working across painting, sculpture, and poetry, Diederich explores the complex relationship between human desire and the natural world. Through luminous, layered landscapes characterized by cinematic depth, chromatic intensity, and intuitive mark-making, her work considers how nature is framed, interpreted, and shaped by human intervention, and what resists those efforts at control.

At the heart of Diederich’s practice is an ongoing poem written in tandem with her visual work over the past decade. Rather than presenting the poem as a separate text, Diederich releases it line by line through the titles of her paintings, creating an evolving dialogue between language and image. Each work becomes part of a larger narrative, one that remains open to shifting interpretations and associations.

In Outside Nature, Diederich draws on the symbolism, materiality, and visual language of the late Gothic Unicorn Tapestries, housed at The Met Cloisters in New York. These intricate works depict the Hortus Conclusus, or enclosed garden - a space defined by boundaries, desire, and the relationship between the cultivated and the wild. Within the tapestries, plants appear in perpetual bloom or fruit, transcending their natural seasons and geographic origins. Their imagined abundance raises questions about how nature is represented, ordered, and transformed through human vision.

Diederich considers the garden not simply as an ornamental space, but as a site of rhetoric and exclusion. The word garden is connected to the idea of a boundary in many cultures, suggesting that cultivation is as much an expression of human desire as it is a gathering of living species. What is permitted to flourish, what is left outside, and what remains unseen become equally significant. Nature, in Diederich’s view, cannot be reduced to decoration; flora and fauna follow their own timescales and patterns, often exceeding the systems imposed upon them.

The tapestries also offer a point of departure for Diederich’s investigation into repetition, perception, and the mysterious life of images. Their intricate stitching and distinctive colors, historically produced through dyes such as weld, madder, and woad, reveal a world in which no two marks are quite the same. As Diederich writes, “repetition does not exist.” A flower may appear to be the same as another, yet each instance of blooming carries its own temporal and material difference.

These ideas extend into broader questions about knowledge, technology, and transformation. Reflecting on the differences between human inquiry and the extraction of data through artificial intelligence, Diederich considers the ways we filter and alter our environments to create new possibilities for thought. The unicorn, a central figure in the tapestries, becomes a point of connection to alchemy and purification, suggesting the potential for transformation, of matter, perception, and the self.

Throughout Outside Nature, images function as distillations of thought, memory, and experience. They resist singular meanings even as they generate narratives that can be felt and understood intuitively. By bringing together landscape, poetry, historical imagery, and material investigation, Diederich invites viewers to consider the unstable boundaries between nature and culture, representation and reality, and repetition and change.

Kristen Diederich (b. 1994, Tallahassee, Florida) works across painting, sculpture, and poetry. She works from Whitehead Island off the coast of Maine and from her studio in Northeast Portland, Oregon.

ARTWORK

KRISTEN DIEDERICH 2026