Sargent's Daughters

Sarah Rosalena | Star Rose, Rose Star January 10 – February 15, 2025 Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present Star Rose Rose Star, the debut New York solo exhibition of Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist Sarah Rosalena. Rosalena’s innovative practice combines traditional handicrafts with emerging technology. This exhibition features all new handwoven textiles produced via digital jacquard loom alongside ceramics, which are 3D-printed to mimic woven basketry. These works combine cutting-edge technologies to blur binaries between high and low tech, human and nonhuman, ancient and future, tradition and progress, moving beyond power structures rooted in colonialism. The exhibition’s title refers to star and rose motifs, traditional to Indigenous and Wixárika textile designs, which recur throughout Rosalena’s work – on weavings, in the forms of baskets and ceramics, and in hand-beaded patterns with frayed edges pointing toward the infinite. When seen from the reverse side of a textile, the star appears as a rose design, and this interchangeability and adaptability of forms is central to Rosalena’s practice. Like a fractal, the star and rose can fold into each other infinitely, evincing an interconnection between the terrestrial and the cosmic. This star/rose breaks boundaries and borders of patterns, as both a digital compass and a single point of origin for multi-directional expansion. Rosalena’s ceramic works are produced through 3D printing coils of ceramic material to mimic woven baskets, occasionally transitioning to dramatic spirals of coiled pine needle basketry partway up the vessel. Some are adorned with long, loose strings of beads, and their unfolding forms mimic the star/rose pattern of the textile works. They demonstrate the ways a form or a line can contain multiplicities and suggest analogies and throughlines between traditional forms of making. This modularity is constitutive of the textiles themselves and linked to the origins of computing. Jacquard looms, which Rosalena used to weave all of the works on view, are programmed to weave one pixel per thread. The artist designed the patterns from digital images, depicting roses from her garden, stars, and galaxies. Rosalena, born from multiple generations of women weavers and an experienced coder, exploits this historical linkage both to underline the interconnectedness of these media and to destabilize the accepted hierarchy between them. In this way, her practice highlights craft, women’s labor, and Indigenous technologies against contemporary technologies and progress. Sarah Rosalena (b.1982, Los Angeles, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, CA, renowned for bridging traditional handicrafts with cutting-edge technology. She is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Art at UC Santa Barbara in Computational Craft and Haptic Media. Rosalena has received numerous accolades, including the Creative Capital Award, the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Artadia Award, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, and the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Art Prize. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at institutions including LACMA (Los Angeles, CA), the Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, OH), the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA), Clockshop (Los Angeles, CA), and Blum & Poe Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Her pieces are held in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art (Notre Dame, IN). Rosalena’s recent mid-career survey, In All Directions, at the Columbus Museum of Art, examined the geopolitical effects of climate change, artificial intelligence, and extractive industries to imagine futures outside these logics, while signaling the expansiveness of the land and sky against resolutions of mapping and control—by reorienting us to the infinite. Her work is currently on view in El Trienal at El Museo del Barrio (New York, NY) and in Pacific Standard Time, organized by the Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA) at venues across Los Angeles. Image caption: Sarah Rosalena Stellar Loops, 2024 Seed beads, nylon thread, 3D printed stoneware/earthenware 5.5 x 5.5 x 8 in.