Danielle Adina Nordenberg (b. MA 1996) is a first generation, 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 Midway Artist Gallery in Boston, Shockboxx Gallery in LA, The Canvas by Querencia in NYC, and the City of Bostons Fay Chandler Emerging Artists Exhibition.Raised by a family who came to the US as refugees from Lithuania in 1989 their work is informed by the unresolved impacts of generations raised under war, occupation and displacement as well as their own experience of growing up in a queer disabled body.With images often rooted in narratives and touching on themes of authenticity, questions of what it means to reveal the (un)real and exploring its scope, their practice is a healing modality honoring growth that occurs in the unlocalized.Nordenberg's paintings 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.They believe that creative experimentation and enabling its pursuit at any age is not a luxury but an imperative urgent modality of connecting, nourishing and practicing our authenticity, being ourselves, and trust for and relationship with our inner worlds in a world that does everything in its power to sever it.