Bio:

Danielle Adina Nordenberg (b. MA 1996) is a first generation Jewish Lithuanian, queer, Boston based painter, gardener, and visual art educator. Their work explores questions of authenticity and what it means to reveal the (un)real by way of using bright and fearless palettes, while threading fantastical and representational imagery in the same compositions. Nordenberg’s work has been shown at the Fay Chandler Exhibition by the City of Boston, Midway Artist Gallery in Boston, Shockboxx Gallery in LA, The Canvas by Querencia in NYC, The Lowell Arts League in Lowell, and Wallkill River Center for the Arts in upstate NY.  They have taught at the Garfield School through the City of Revere, organized and coordinated interdisciplinary experimental art programming at The Foundry across movement, cinematography, painting, and poetry. A late bloomer they started painting with regularity in late 2018/early 2019 and pursued their visual development with an insatiable hunger. They enjoy dabbling in multiple art forms and hope to expand their sensorial, emotive articulations over time to unlock new levels of freedom and authenticity. Professionally they have worked in digital archives preserving, organizing and editing microfilm and fiche, as a gallery assistant, producer of a PBS and Kanopy streamed as well as WGBH reviewed documentary on METCO, and have been working across interior horticulture, botanical design and exterior gardening for the past several years.

Their work is largely influenced by working as an EMT, in a nursing home, growing up with disability, generational trauma and cycles of abuse rooted in a long eastern european lineage surviving Russian colonialism as well as the Holocaust. They are interested in displacements as they occur in memory, culture, and body and push against a voice that is overly clear, didactic and posturing. Their work is often rooted in narratives or conversations and invoke bright colors alongside a “childish” sensibility as they believe many oppressive forces hinge on ableism and infantilization, perpetuating in turn a very narrow view of understanding and the value we ascribe it. Nordenbergs work pedestals frill, fringe, cringe, and kitsch as it translates the verbal into the imaginary frame— not as avoidance but as encounter.

Their creativity is an ever evolving spiritual practice focusing on shadow magic and inner transformations allowing for more beautiful, creative transmutations and lived relationships.

Statement:

Danielle Adina Nordenberg's work, influenced by their family's Soviet and refugee experience and their own queer and disabled histories, explores themes of authenticity and the (un)real. Their paintings weave together realism with fantastical elements to create dreamlike narratives inviting viewers into spaces of subtle discomfort. Growing up amidst ableism, homophobia, and generational disconnections their early coping mechanism of transfiguring negative spaces evolved into a refusal to see absence as lack, animating the ambiguous in-betweens. Personal experiences, conversations, and sensations are assembled into surreal forms often derived from digitally collaging images and drawings. The consonance of bright colors with out-of-place imagery creates an eerie tone. Their vibrant palette, and almost cartoon-ish, “unserious” compositions challenges conventional notions of validity and knowledge, relishing the mysterious and resisting confinement. Nordenberg’s creations serve as an homage to everything that defies categorization, seeking to preserve the tenderness of all that roams within the strange and uncertain.