In her first solo exhibition, Dreamwell, Detroit-based painter Gretchen Adel explores the realm of the unconscious through the symbolic language of dreams. Drawing on the associative, nonlinear logic of dreams, she explores the fluid boundaries between our inner and outer worlds, where conscious thought gives way to deeper currents of shared memory and myth.
The works evoke the feeling of piecing together a dream from the night before. As strange recollections and familiar, everyday imagery intermingle, details become blurred, making it difficult to distinguish between what is remembered and what is imagined.
Lush landscapes and natural elements appear throughout, pointing to the ongoing exchange between the world around us and our inner lives. The reflective surface of a lake becomes a kind of passage into the psyche, and moonlight and nightfall create an atmosphere of suspension that loosens and softens the boundaries of ordinary perception. Within each painting, figures and forms emerge and recede, suggesting multiple places and moments coexist and are unfolding on the same plane.
Each work begins with a simple digital collage, but as Adel begins painting, the image continues to change and evolve. She rearranges figures and shifts color planes, intuitively addressing compositional challenges as they arise. Uncertainty becomes generative, allowing unexpected relationships and new meanings to surface. Images and stories unfold as they do in dreams, following loose associations rather than a predetermined sequence. Meaning is not fixed in advance but emerges through the relationships between disparate elements, making the process one of discovery.
Adel holds a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, where she was awarded the Walter B. Ford Award of Excellence Full Tuition Scholarship. Her work has been shown at Louis Buhl & Co. and Scarab Club in Detroit and Lubov Gallery in New York.
