Rising up in north-east Los Angeles, Sarah Rosalena was deeply influenced by the data and abilities handed down by her household, from her grandfather’s work in astrophysics at LA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the weaving traditions of her maternal Wixárika heritage, in addition to grasp weavers throughout the Southwest.
I exist due to the variety and tradition of Los Angeles
These pursuits in science, expertise and craft developed into her cutting-edge creative observe of the final 20 years, and her tenure as an affiliate professor of computational craft and haptic media on the College of California, Santa Barbara. By elaborating new strategies and breaking down the divisions between craft and expertise, human and non-human, previous and future, Rosalena’s work subverts the extractive, colonial techniques of mapping, imaging and seize to ascertain new worlds and potential futures. Commissioned by LACMA to create a everlasting work for the David Geffen Galleries, Rosalena produced a richly textured 27ft tapestry, her largest to this point. Utilizing her private handweaving patterns, she distorted computer-generated satellite tv for pc imagery of planetary terrains, reworking them into woven buildings, to blur land and cosmos, earth and ambiance. The end result was woven on an industrial-scale jacquard-rapier loom.
The Artwork Newspaper: How is your observe of mixing Indigenous craft strategies and rising applied sciences knowledgeable by your background?
Sarah Rosalena: I see myself at the start as a weaver working on the intersection of craft and expertise. As an Angeleno, I grew up studying tips on how to weave within the Wixárika custom of my matriarchal bloodline by watching my mom and my grandmother. That allowed me to see and perceive patterns line by line by way of textile.
I used to be additionally all the time fascinated by cameras, media, seize and determination—and understanding them from a weaving standpoint. It’s about difficult the hierarchies that isolate these [disciplines], whether or not that’s textile, Indigenous craft or expertise, from each other.
Sarah Rosalena’s monumental textile piece Threading the Boundless: Omnidirectional Terrain (2025) © Sarah Rosalena; photograph: © Museum Associates/LACMA/Jonathan City
My observe is what occurs when all this stuff come collectively. And that’s the place fascinating issues start to emerge, similar to various futures, alternatives for world-building, fascinated by energy, land and the cosmos, and the way we see and perceive ourselves.
How does this manifest in your fee for LACMA?
I all the time begin all my work by handweaving it on the loom and designing my drafts from scratch. To play with how sure yarns hover or burrow underneath others, I mixed several types of yarn, similar to comfortable mohair, to invoke the atmospheric. I additionally use one thing extra reddish and metallic that appears virtually Martian or alien, and blues which might be utterly oceanic.
What was it like working at this scale?
This fee was one of the difficult I’ve completed to this point, due to consistently having to pattern and experiment to get the impact that I needed in 27ft. There are over 12,000 warp threads and it was essential to calculate how they had been going to be interacting with each other and what can be revealed.
There are only some looms on this planet which might be massive sufficient, and which might additionally enable me to experiment, as a result of looms at this scale are historically used for manufacturing and business. I actually loved difficult the character of the sample, however this piece can be an accumulation of all of the digital weaving patterns that I’ve generated over time, so there’s a bit little bit of me all through it.
How did you utilize Nasa’s satellite tv for pc pictures?
This work is an imagined planetary panorama that makes use of altered satellite tv for pc imagery of Mars and Earth because the groundwork for including weaving patterns. I’m fascinated by breaking the binaries, limitations and bounds which might be expressed by way of instruments similar to mapping, cartography or extraction to generate an alternate viewpoint and a world that disrupts geospatial edges. Although it’s woven, the piece appears virtually prefer it’s glitching out—there’s a refusal of digital smoothing and an undoing of digital seize.
In fascinated by the planetary imaginary, how does that concept push up towards notions of Mars, and outer house extra typically, as the following frontier to be colonised?
That’s what the resistance is for. Who will get to visualise these terrains? Who has entry to them? I see this work as a web site of resistance. Textile is the oldest expertise on Earth that all of us share, but it has been so disregarded in fascinated by imaging, though it’s the origin of the place all of those applied sciences come from. [With LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab grant in 2019] I made work combining machine-learning and textile, and started to confront the origins of the expertise itself, as a result of it’s based mostly on this colonial, structured framework that holds the facility of imaginative and prescient, naming and understanding. Weaving is a means that I might pull it aside, retie it in a knot or redo it altogether. That’s as a result of weaving makes use of the identical binary language of zeros and ones. Textile is a strong web site wherein to make hybrid works.
As a local Angeleno, what’s the significance of engaged on a everlasting set up for LACMA?
This work is 100% a love letter to Los Angeles. My grandfather labored for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and, on the opposite facet, my household labored predominantly as gardeners and migrant staff. I exist due to the variety and tradition of Los Angeles.
