Adi Blaustein Rejto The Possibilities of Apples

The Pruners at Rose Hill Orchard, 2025
Foraged clays, hematite, gold ochre, verdigris (copper acetate), graphite, lead carbonate, and walnut oil on traditionally gessoed wood

The Pruners at Rose Hill Orchard, 2025 (detail)

When the apple changes your sex and desire and self, in Eden, 2024
Foraged clays, verdigris (copper acetate), hematite, gold ochre, lead carbonate, silver and copper point on vinyl spackled wood

When the apple changes your sex and desire and self, in Eden, 2024
Foraged clays, verdigris (copper acetate), hematite, gold ochre, lead carbonate, silver and copper point on vinyl spackled wood

The Possibilities of Apples, Installation view

Playing solo, sunlit, sitting on top a pile of apples, 2024
Foraged clays, hematite, verdigris (copper acetate), star gold, graphite, walnut oil, lead carbonate, and milk paint on wood

Playing solo, sunlit, sitting on top a pile of apples, 2024

Together, under a Big Gilded Delicious, 2025
Foraged clays, hematite, verdigris (copper acetate), star gold, graphite, walnut oil, and lead carbonate on cadmium red-tinted-traditionally gessoed wood

Pomona’s Gifts, 2024
Foraged clays, hematite, verdigris (copper acetate), walnut oil and lead carbonate on traditionally gessoed wood

Pomona’s Gifts, 2024
Foraged clays, hematite, verdigris (copper acetate), walnut oil and lead carbonate on traditionally gessoed wood

The Possibilities of Apples, Installation view

Adi and Evan (Beckmann’s Adam and Eve), 2025
Foraged clays, lead carbonate, verdigris (copper acetate), walnut oil, Black Mother of Pearl and Donkey Ear Abalone, and wood glue on cadmium red-tinted-traditionally gessoed wood

Comfort Apple (to want and not have), 2024
Foraged clays, hematite, gold ochre, verdigris (copper acetate), lead carbonate, cadmium red, walnut oil, and milk paint on wood

Comfort Apple (to want and not have), 2024
Foraged clays, hematite, gold ochre, verdigris (copper acetate), lead carbonate, cadmium red, walnut oil, and milk paint on wood

Winter tree at Rose Hill Orchard, 2025
Sawkill brown clay, lead carbonate, and walnut oil on traditionally gessoed wood

Winter tree at Rose Hill Orchard, 2025
Sawkill brown clay, lead carbonate, and walnut oil on traditionally gessoed wood

Dance of the Spider Mother, 2025
Foraged clays, hematite, verdigris (copper acetate), gold ochre, lead carbonate, and walnut oil on traditionally gessoed wood

Dance of the Spider Mother, 2025
Foraged clays, hematite, verdigris (copper acetate), gold ochre, lead carbonate, and walnut oil on traditionally gessoed wood

The Possibilities of Apples, Installation view

Apple Box (instrument)

Clay apples on the ground are made from “wild” clay purchased from Star Works Clay (Star, NC)

The Possibilities of Apples
Adi Blaustein Rejto
April 12- May 17, 2025

In Adi Blaustein Rejto’s hands, apples become offerings—gifts wrapped in paper bags, labeled with names that taste like spells: Api Etoile, Porter’s Perfection, Winesap, Brandywine. Rooted in site and sensation, her work treats these fruits not just as produce but as poetic objects—carriers of genetic memory, epic narratives, and the religiosity of it all. No gesture is ever just a gesture. A painting becomes a space where materials, feelings, and people are sorted and stored—like a tongue tracing the last taste of sweetness across the roof of the mouth. The paintings do not record what happened so much as what it felt like, how it’s metabolized.

Adi’s process begins on the ground. She forages pigment from creek beds and sediments, turning land into color. These acts of collection and transformation echo in the apple’s own story: grafted hybrids, histories spliced and passed down, bittersweet in the mouth. If pigment holds the geology of a place, then apples hold its mythology.

The Possibilities of Apples gathers these materials into a sensory lexicon: bitter pippins and hornets, walnut oil and iron oxide, dry umami vinegar dust. Paintings function like dream-scripts or field recordings, thick with associative overflow. Earth and body are one porous system. A parrot sings a molecular gospel, while a mother morphs into a spider nymph, rat-shadow, and gold-veiled oracle. There is hunger here, and cloying sweetness. A building caves in. A red apple is raised like a severed head.

In this exhibition, the apple becomes a generative symbol—ecological, personal, mythic. It is more than a fruit; it is a site of desire, confusion, and mourning. The orchard is a stage for repetition and mutation, trial and alchemy. Apples are packed, cloned, consumed, fermented; they rot, shimmer, and return again.

This is how Adi paints—with pigment and image, with heat, humor, and broken lyric. Her work circles language, pressing on what words can’t quite reach—what apples mean, what memory does with what it can’t digest. She paints as if mid-incantation, coaxing mythology from mud, asking: “Did I prune this right? Will that graft take ok?”

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Adi Blaustein Rejto (she/her) is a painter and performer born, raised, and living in the Mid-Hudson Valley. Using foraged pigments to make oil paints, Adi’s paintings respond to site-specific histories while simultaneously building new histories and fantasies. In all her work, Adi dreams of a world where Palestine is free, where trans people are free, and where all beings are safe, peaceful, and free of suffering.

Adi Blaustein Rejto
The Possibilites of Apples
April 12 - May 28, 2025

Adrienne Herr
4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry

March 14- April 5, 2025

Audrey Gair
Rind

November 22, 2024 - January 4, 2025

Phyllis Baldino, Max Guy & Ellie Rae Hunter
Outliners
October 4 - November 10, 2024

Elly Reitman
energy
August 16 - September 20, 2024

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie
The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica Pinteric
July 12 - July 29, 2024

Tiziana La Melia
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
June 7 - July 6, 2024

Jacob Jackmauh, Caitlin McCann & Benjamin Stallings
As for me, I’m just passing through this planet
March 8 - April 14, 2024

Irina Jasnowski Pascual
Wipers
September 15 - October 29, 2023

Coco Klockner
honesty
July 8 - August 6, 2023

Morgan Canavan, Ben Estes, Marisa Takal
More Coming Back & More Returning
May 5 - June 11, 2023

Sylvie Hayes-Wallace
Center of the Universe
August 5 - September 18, 2022

Amanda Horowitz
Bad Water, True West or Between Myself the Crickets and the Coyote
performed by Sophia Cleary and Ada Friedman
July 14 & July 15, 2022

Suzanna Zak
Coming Home to the Ice Age
opening May 13 - June 24, 2022

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About
Instagram

★

open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee

Adrienne Herr 4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry March 14- April 5, 2025

November 22, 2024 - January 4, 2025

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica PintericJuly 12 - July 29, 2024 Tiziana La Melia Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster June 7 - July 6, 2024

★ About Instagram ★open by appointment located beside320 E. Churchwell Ave Knoxville, Tennessee

Adrienne Herr
4 possible endings that are so happy they make you cry

March 14- April 5, 2025

Michelle Grabner, Kathleen Morris & Bronson Smillie
The Weather, or some other accident, curated by Danica Pinteric
July 12 - July 29, 2024

Tiziana La Melia
Country Mouse City Mouse Hamster
June 7 - July 6, 2024

★

About
Instagram

★

open by appointment

located beside
320 E. Churchwell Ave
Knoxville, Tennessee