Sarah Rosalena: Intersectional and Intergalactic Art-Making

SCI-Arc Channel and Carla have teamed up to co-produce a series of short films that focus on L.A.-based artists who are working around issues of community and social justice.

Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Sarah Rosalena weaves contemporary technology with Indigenous traditions, dissolving the borders of colonial logic to generate weavings that tell of landscapes not-of-this-world. Her work deconstructs technology with material interventions, creating new narratives for hybrid objects that function between human/nonhuman, ancient/future, and handmade/autonomous to override power structures rooted in colonialism. Sourcing imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Rosalena programs her loom to turn pixels into thread, showing how information derived from new world geographies and extractive tech can be broken down into material form, collapsing binaries and borders, and suggesting new connections between Earth and Space.

Rosalena is Assistant Professor of Art at UC Santa Barbara in Computational Craft and Haptic Media and affiliated faculty at the Center for Responsible Machine Learning. Her research supports Indigenous mentorship and scholarship in art, science, and technology. She was recently given the Creative Capital Award, the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology, and the Craft Futures Grant from Center for Craft. She has recently presented work and research at LACMA, Blum & Poe Gallery, and Frieze LA. Her work is in the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This film is based on a review by Allison Noelle Conner in Carla, issue 24

Crew Credits:

Production:
Creator and Executive Producer – Hernán Díaz Alonso
Producers – Marcelyn Gow/Reza Monahan
Segment Producer/Interviewer – Lindsay Preston Zappas
Director – Reza Monahan
Director of Photography – Sean Morris
B Camera – Alex Velasco
C Camera – Mitch Brinker
Sound Engineer – Chris Trueman

Post-Production:
Story Producer – Vivian Charlesworth
Editors – Cal Crawford/Reza Monahan

Soundtrack:
“Rainy Day – Instrumentalist Version” by Generation Lost
“MEANING” by Ted Byrnes

Additional Images and Video Courtesy of Sara Rosalena Brady and NASA/JPL-Caltech

Frieze Art Fair Images, Beadwork and Textile Images
Photographer: Ian Byers-Gamber
“Above Below” Images
Photographer: Jenalee Harmon

©2022 SCI-Arc Channel

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