Renata Daina: Amulet

About

Keystone Gallery is pleased to announce Renata Daina: Amulet opening on Saturday, June 8 from 6 - 9pm. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery and presents handwoven textiles, sculpture, and works on paper.

Daina’s tactile, mixed media practice explores the precious terrain between ancestral traditions and personal memories. Soft talismans conjure earthly and otherworldly desires that are informed by new materialist theories and pre-Christian cosmologies. Methods reflect spiraling life cycles and future (post)human landscapes.

Drawing from weaving patterns passed down to her through generations, Daina merges geometric designs and fluid abstractions. Labor-intensive techniques, such as embroidery, hand weaving, and rope coiling appear in two and three dimensional works. Her material explorations draw on painting and textile traditions combining handmade and found materials.

In Amulet, Daina delves further into our spiritual entanglement in an increasingly fragile ecosystem. Coiled and stitched sculptures melt the grid into biomorphic forms mimicking organic growths and disintegrations. The timeless knowledge of ancestors simultaneously appearing and disappearing.

Renata Daina is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. She was born in the United States and raised in Australia where she learned traditional Lithuanian textile crafts from her grandmother, and is a fifth generation weaver. Daina received a BFA with Honors Cum Laude from the University of Southern California, and studied Fashion & Textile Design at the University of Technology Sydney. She was greatly involved in on and off-stage processes growing up in a creative household of theater artists. She built on these experiences in the past nearly ten years making costumes, installations, and props for advertising, retail, and television. Daina was a 2022 Fiber Artist in Residence at Township10, and has exhibited work in Australia, Europe, and the United States.