Open Studios
Glogau Residency, Berlin
In parallel with the Vitruvian Woman series, Adler's focus while working in Berlin, was to collect found objects and materials about town in an effort to experiment with recycled materials at a large scale. She saw this not only as a feminist endeavor in order to work at a larger scale, but also as a project she felt encapsulated the spirit of Berlin.
One of the recycled material pieces, entitled God is in the Mattress, experiments with this theme. This project is a humorous albeit feminist play on famed architect Mies van Der Rohe's God is in the Details, in which the humor lays within the manipulation of the found material. The chiseled texture of the mirrored halves of a roughly 4" thick full sized foam mattress is a result of the tension and force enacted on the foam by Adler slicing, pulling, and pushing her body into the mattress from all four corners. In effect, this technique of the splitting of foam with an Olfa knife, pushing her way through the material created a strange blend of topographic and biomorphic textures, and in combination with the symmetry of the two halves, perhaps a spiritual one as well. She decided to further elevate the piece by plastering it in place on the wall, leaving the foam mattress exposed on the edges, as if to reveal the sides of the canvas.