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Lauren Carrera

Lauren Carrera

F. L. Carrera is a Portland-based multidisciplinary artist, whose work explores and celebrates the wonder and awe of the natural world, of museum and scientific collections, and of the human imagination. Nominated for the San Diego Art Prize as one of the "New Contemporaries" in 2012, Carrera's notable installations include the San Diego Museum of Art, Oceanside Museum of Art, the Monterey Museum, Museo du Profundo Mundo, Portland's BLDG 5, TERRAIN, and the Newport Visual Arts Center, hosts for Carrera's mid-career retrospective, supported by grants from the Ford Family Foundation and the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts. Carrera's paintings are included in numerous private and corporate collections. Her work draws upon her training as a scientist, marrying art and science with a dash of humor.

"Walk into one of [Carrera's] exhibitions...and you enter a composed environment in which time, science, and culture collide...overlapping one another...creating dissonances and unexpected harmonies as if caught inside some particularly fertile moment of creation." 
-Bob Hicks, Executive Editor, Oregon ArtsWatch

"The Carrera Expedition is my ongoing body of work, drawing inspiration from the 19th century naturalists and the world's great museums of natural history to present exhibits of 'specimens and renderings' that explore our sometimes fraught and sometimes reverent relationship with the natural world. My work also examines the ways in which museum collections (and their provenance) give shape to our understanding of science and nature in the context of the mores of science and society.

My paintings and installations further give consideration to the ways in which images from our personal and collective memories push through layers of time and new experiences into our thoughts. For example, my "palimpsest" layered paintings all begin with a landscape. Over a fully realized painting, I then add up to ten layers of oil paint and cold wax, obscuring the original image to produce an effect akin to the processes of memory and forgetting. These "palimpsests", in which the original text has been effaced, scraped or altered to allow for rewriting, still bear traces of the original - for as Faulkner reminds us, 'The past is never dead. It's not even past'."



Media: Encaustic | Mixed Media | Oil | Painting

Studio Number: 107

Address: 2516 NW 29th Avenue Unit 31 Portland OR 97210

Community: NW Portland

Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible

Email: artbycarrera@gmail.com

Website: LaurenCarrera.com

Instagram: @artbycarrera