Danielle Adina Nordenberg (b. MA, 1996) is a queer, first generation, nonbinary, Boston based botanical designer and visual artist. Their work has been shown at Midway Gallery at Midway Artist Studios in Boston, Shockboxx Gallery in LA, Wallkill River Arts Center in NY, 17 Frost Gallery in NYC, The Canvas by Querencia in NYC, and The Lowell Arts League in Lowell. When not in a box of paints they have always felt most at home enveloped by trees, embraced by water. They paint out of studio 47 at Joy Street Studios and are always open to studio visits and experimentations.

Their artistic journey was an outgrowth of the challenges of growing up disabled, queer, and the child of Soviet era Jewish Lithuanian immigrants. Through this time it served as a profound source of solace. Their family arrived in the US as refugees in 1989, and despite overcoming adversity and finding their way into improved circumstances, the lingering echoes of war, fear, shame, and estrangement permeated their lives. Their art practice serves as a cathartic storytelling device, addressing wounds stored within their vessel. It is both a healing and exploratory modality, delving into the topography and distortions of pain and how our surroundings imprint on the design of our interior landscape. Through their work, they explore the processes of losing and finding oneself, as well as how one orbits or embodies authenticity, self, or otherhood.

Disability, ableism, and homophobia marked significant portions of their early life. Experiencing generational, communal, and physical disconnections left them feeling like they didn't neatly fit into any particular community. Long before they began painting regularly, they sought refuge during times of upheaval and ostracization by staring into the negative spaces of trees, the textures of ceilings, hues of the night, and the cracks in asphalt—discovering figures and forms within.

Though this started as a coping mechanism they came to view it as a sort of subversion, a form of refusal and rebellion. Rather than perceiving absence in negative space, they animated it, understanding animacy, intimacy, and strange-making as forms of doing, built in relation. Somewhere in the mirrors of cultural memory and the biological distortions of their own, Nordenberg became intrigued by the literality of fiction.

Personal accounts, conversations, and emotional memories are translated into surreal, fantastical forms intertwined with representational elements. This approach resists reducing people to qualities, honoring experience by maintaining the magic of mystery over consumption of the body. The consonance of fantastical and representational imagery challenges the impulse to flatten narratives into something sensible. Nordenberg is intrigued by how we reveal the real and the incorporation of the unreal into its scope, exploring our capacity to connect in states of disconnect. Through their painting processes, they explore what interrupts or stretches the reach of understanding and compassion.

Representational forms, along with obscene or out-of-place imagery, coexist with their cartoony counterparts, contributing to an uncanny, unsettled, and eerie tone. Bright, varied colors permeate tightly bound imagery reminiscent of words. In some meandering way, they found solace and fragments of themselves in the stories of others, the clarity of myth and the edges of metaphor.