Inside the Studio: Denise Jones Adler
- Art Dealer Street
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
Denise Jones Adler works with what others might overlook.
Newspapers, advertisements, photographs, torn paper, fragments of language, and pieces of visual debris enter her studio not as waste, but as evidence. In her hands, discarded materials become clues — pieces of a larger emotional and symbolic puzzle. A word, a figure, a distressed surface, or a half-visible image may become the starting point for a painting that moves between memory, myth, body, and dream.
Adler’s mixed-media paintings live in a space that feels both grounded and unstable. They are built from real materials, yet they often open into something more mysterious: dreamscapes, psychic landscapes, mythic fragments, and emotional fields where the personal and universal meet.
Her work does not offer one fixed story. Instead, it invites viewers to enter the image slowly, to find their own associations, and to discover meanings that may shift with every look.
In this week’s Inside the Studio, Denise Jones Adler reflects on found materials, the power of the in-between, mythology in contemporary life, studying with feminist artist Juanita McNeely, curating for other artists, and her recent experiences at Alessandro Berni Gallery and Clio Art Fair.
Read on to learn more in an exclusive interview with Denise Jones Adler:
Your work often begins with discarded materials — newspapers, advertisements, photographs, and fragments from daily life. What makes a piece of visual “trash” worth saving, and how do you know when it belongs inside a painting?
It is very much a feeling.
It may be the shape of something, or the way it has been distressed by paint or by a marking. It might be a word or sentence written on it, or a figure or body part that appears within it.
I have many scraps of paper and pieces of detritus that I have saved because they resonated with me in some way. They are all visual expressions, puzzle pieces that can be put together in different ways.
You describe your work as existing in the space between the physical and the ethereal, the personal and the universal, the past and the present. What happens in that “in-between” space that you cannot reach through a more direct image?
The space between is where I locate the questions I cannot answer directly.
We live in the present, certain of what is real and actual, but I am drawn to the limits of that certainty: the microscopic and cosmic scales we cannot fully grasp, the strangeness of existing in time and space at all, on one planet within an unbounded universe.
This in-between is not empty. It is the connective tissue that holds our understood reality together, even as it remains the very thing that allows us to grow, to learn, to change, and to know ourselves more fully.
It holds two truths at once: our singularity, our fundamental aloneness, and our inseparable relation to everything beyond us.
A direct image can show what something is. The space between lets me show what it means to be suspended between knowing and not knowing.
Your paintings often feel like dreamscapes, but they are built from very real materials. Are you trying to escape reality, reassemble it, or expose the strange mythology already hidden inside it?
The detritus I use is evidence of life, but it is also a way to hold the complicated nature of experience.
I find things in my own work that surprise me, that remind me of something I had forgotten. In reassembling these disparate snippets of what is constantly happening around us, I am piecing experience back together and opening up possibilities.
Yes, I am creating a story. But the story or myth is not mine to fix in place. It belongs to the person looking at it. It stays open to interpretation.
I love when someone tells me what a particular painting means to them. Often it is not what I intended, and that is the whole point.
Myth, spirituality, and symbolic figures appear throughout your work. Why do you think myth still matters in contemporary life, especially in a culture so driven by speed, information, and surface?
Myth persists because the medium changes, but the hunger does not.
Whether our stories come in two-minute clips or two-hour films, we are still doing what humans have always done: looking for heroes and villains to make sense of things we cannot otherwise hold onto.
What fascinates me is how precisely the oldest mythic patterns repeat now, only faster. An algorithm can manufacture a god overnight, give someone the glow of inevitability, and then turn on them the moment they slip.
That is Icarus. He was warned to fly the middle course, neither too low nor too high, and he ignored it for the thrill of the climb. The wax melted, and he fell. We are watching that same arc now, compressed from a generation of storytelling into a 48-hour news cycle.
My work lives inside that same instability. A piece might offer one story on the surface, something legible and whole. But look again and the ground shifts.
I am not interested in handing anyone a finished story. I want the same uncertainty that has always lived inside myth, where meaning depends on how closely, and how long, you are willing to look.
You studied with feminist artist Juanita McNeely early in your development. What did that experience teach you about the body, power, image-making, or the responsibility of being an artist?
Studying with Juanita McNeely was an extraordinary experience.
She taught me to trust my gut, to take chances, to develop my own voice, and to speak my own truth rather than borrow someone else’s.
At the time, I did not know her own work, or the unflinching way she dealt with the body and pain. I only understood that later, looking back. But what I did know was that she was a feminist, and that she was a force of nature.
Her philosophy was never something she only talked about. It was experiential. She taught through doing, so we were living her belief about the body and image-making before I had the language to name what I was learning.
Image-making is not separate from responsibility. What you choose to show, and how honestly you show it, is itself a kind of power.
She also taught the value of sensitivity and presence, to actually feel things rather than perform feeling. That message took time to land. But thankfully, it eventually hit its mark.
Your works often carry multiple histories at once — personal memory, found imagery, cultural references, and emotional residue. How do you keep the painting from becoming overloaded, and how do you know when chaos has become composition?
There is always a separate strand in my work that offers reprieve or resolution for what I am experiencing in my life.
It is an intuitive process, almost like a meditation. Over the course of making a piece, certain thoughts surface — a memory, a fragment of material, something from that week — and they shift the direction I take.
I am striving to create balance in the story I am channeling. Somewhere in that balance is the vision, and that is where chaos becomes composition.
You are not only an artist, but also a founder, curator, and director of artist-run spaces. How has building platforms for other artists changed the way you understand your own work?
Curating and building platforms for other artists has given me a kind of mirror for my own practice, but it really runs both ways.
Putting a show together is the same act as standing at the easel: creating balance, holding a vision, and calming chaos into something coherent.
A varied roster will not let me lean on my own habits. Meeting each artist’s work on its own terms means I cannot take the easy path, and that discipline comes back into my studio. I cannot settle for the familiar gesture when I know there is a truer one.
So it is a constant exchange. My practice shapes how I see and arrange other artists’ work, and curating sharpens how I see my own: the same negotiation between order and chaos, seen from both directions.
You recently participated in Gesture, Perception, Identity at Alessandro Berni Gallery in New York, alongside Eva March and Lauralee Franco. What stayed with you most from that exhibition — the dialogue between the works, the audience, the space, or the way your own paintings shifted in that context?
Being in Gesture, Perception, Identity at Alessandro Berni Gallery with Eva and Lauralee was a genuinely exciting experience.
There is something energizing about working with a gallery and artists I had not worked with before. I treated the exhibition title as a guideline, and it shaped both which pieces I included and how they were placed.
The interplay between all three bodies of work was not obvious from the outset, so building a cohesive show took real thought. I found more natural symbiosis between Lauralee’s work and mine than between mine and Eva’s, but placing my landscape pieces nearer to Eva’s work resolved that tension.
There was also a satisfying flow between my more figurative paintings and Lauralee’s gestural figures, which felt like an unplanned but welcome conversation between our practices.
What stayed with me most, though, was the audience. I had so many rich conversations with people engaging directly with the work, and hearing their reactions in real time was the most rewarding part of the whole show.
You also participated in the May 2026 edition of Clio Art Fair. How did that experience of showing your work directly to a public audience compare with the more intimate setting of a gallery exhibition?
It is always rewarding to find a new audience.
Over the years, my experience at Clio has really been about branching out. At Pictor, we have a loyal following, and being in a gallery building means we do get new eyes coming through for our shows. But fairs like Clio open up the chance to build a much bigger audience beyond that.
I have been strategic about which partners and platforms I align myself with, and that has helped me grow an audience both for Pictor and for my own practice.
Clio Art Fair’s mission is to be the independent artists fair, and that idea resonates with me. I appreciate the reach the fair has built, and I feel genuinely lucky to be part of it.
Denise Jones Adler’s work asks us to slow down inside images that refuse to settle.
Her paintings are built from fragments, but they never feel broken. Instead, they suggest that fragmentation is part of how we understand the world. A scrap of paper, a figure, a sentence, a photograph, or a trace of daily life can become a portal into something larger — memory, myth, body, spirit, uncertainty, and transformation.
What makes her practice compelling is the way it holds contradiction without trying to resolve it. The physical and the ethereal. The personal and the universal. The chaotic and the composed. The known and the unknowable.
Adler does not give the viewer a finished story. She creates a field of signs, textures, symbols, and emotional residue, then leaves room for the viewer to enter. Her paintings remind us that meaning is not always something we are given. Sometimes it is something we find by looking longer.
Through her work as an artist, curator, and platform-builder, Adler continues to create spaces for dialogue — between materials, histories, artists, audiences, and the many stories that live inside a single image.
You can learn more about Denise Jones Adler and her work via these links: Website: Denise Jones Adler Instagram: @deniseadler123
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