Bio
Carrie Lederer is a painter, sculptor and installation artist who exhibits her nature-inspired work across the United States. She is a recipient of the prestigious Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Award, and has completed public art commissions for Facebook, the cities of Palo Alto and Menlo Park, Hudson Valley Seed Company and Imagery Winery. Her work has also been commissioned by UCSF Medical Center, Art Source and private collections.
Lederer has built site-specific installations for Turtle Bay Museum, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and many others. Her work can be found in private collections that include Oakland Museum of California, Stanford Medical Center, First Western Trust Bank, and Prudential Insurance Co., NY. Lederer’s work has been widely reviewed in publications that include MUSES, Michigan State University; New American Paintings; ARTnews; San Francisco Chronicle; Diablo Magazine; and SquareCylinder.com.
Public Art Projects
Facebook Artist in Residence: Lederer created The Land of Magic Awaits, a 10’ x 40’ mixed-media mural. The sprawling work envelopes viewers in imagery and urges them to discover camouflaged elements.
City of Palo Alto, CA; CalTrans Station: Mural commission titled Lost In My Abstract Garden. This interactive work encourages viewers to knit together their own stories and interpretations about our relationship to nature.
Menlo Church Teen Center Mural, Menlo Park, CA: Under the Wide Sky We Gather. Inspired by the bold and delicate forms that exist in nature, the tapestry-like image is realistic and abstract. The magical terrain conveys the rustle of the wind, the flow of water, and the chatter of animals that happen around us every day. Imagery transports viewers across land and sky, illuminating a path to the deep, dark recesses of our universe.
carrielederer.com
Statement
My current work consists of ornate compositions that use a pattern-based topography to portray ideas about land and our natural world. I use a myriad of materials to construct images that are simultaneously ordered, in disarray, realistic and abstract. The tapestry-like format is dense intertwined, sometimes haphazard, and bursting with energy. Seemingly chaotic, the terrain is dynamic, and like our natural world, one hub of activity finds connection and interacts into the next.
When building an artwork, the nature-based imagery is sometimes transformed until it is almost abstracted, with a focus on the delicate, minute, natural systems that are often unnoticed or unseen. I want to take my audience into a different physical space with my work. And I want people to look at my work, consider the earth in new ways, and feel inspired to tread lightly.
It all stems from a personal curiosity about nature, our connection to it, and a fascination with its immense power and beauty. For me, the garden becomes a metaphor for the universe. I strive to immerse people of all ages with interactive art that raises the collective conscious about what is hiding in plain sight in our environment.
I’m interested in micro and macro perspectives to convey the bold and delicate forms that exist in the mysterious realms that surround us. The images are meant to transport viewers across abstracted land and sky, illuminating a path to the deep, dark recesses of our universe.
The science of fractals and patterns of chaos are important to my work. While at first glance fractals might appear as a tangled disorder, there is an inherent structured composition embedded into this dynamic system. I respond to these natural wonderments and nature’s intrinsic capacity to create and reproduce patterns.
My daily, up-close encounter with nature is the fifty-foot journey through our family garden, from home to the studio. I am continually captured by nature’s sheer exuberance—a spectacle of complexity—beautiful, simple, and haphazard.
