Dom is Dom

Dominyka Obelenyte was born in Lithuania and raised in New York City. She did not choose either of those things. From a young age, one of her first choices was the development of her own personal interior world, where entry was barred without her permission. This interior world spans birch forests, her grandfather's plastic greenhouse, pagan bedtime stories in a Bronx apartment, a public school classroom where she didn't speak the language and spent story time inventing candy recipes in her head instead.

Her work is source material birthed from the interior. It is not about the immigrant experience, though she is an immigrant. It is not about surviving an abusive home, though she survived one. It is not about being a woman navigating systems built to exclude her, though she is and they were. It is about what happens to a soul that gets severed from its native cosmology early and spends the rest of its life rebuilding one by hand.

The visual language she works in is one of sovereign interiority. She creates bodies that are also ecosystems, figures that are also maps of the unspeakable, organisms that hover between dissolution and cohesion. Her Lithuanian folk tradition lives alongside Lynchian dream logic, jiu jitsu, spirithood, the women who came before her, and the men who couldn't look at themselves.

Nothing is resolved in her work because resolution is not the reward for living. Every raging, tender and stubborn moment is held with curiosity and the pervasive truth that the systems that tried to obliterate her inner voice only made it louder.

She is a ten time Brazilian Jiu Jitsu World Champion and a Columbia University graduate. She lives and works in Los Angeles.