In All Direction exhibition text by Kris Paulsen

 

Sarah Rosalena’s experimental art practice invites a reconsideration of craft in the context of art history and suggests new possibilities for its relevance in understanding our relationships to technology and innovation. Her work threads traditional and Indigenous techniques through emerging technologies—such as 3D printing, neural networks, and digital weaving— to produce seductive material objects that destabilize the binary structures rooted in colonial and scientific “discovery.” Her hybrid forms of textile, ceramic, and beadwork trouble the boundaries between the ancient and the futuristic, the human and the nonhuman, the handmade and the autonomous, and the earthly and the other-worldly.

 

This mid-career survey positions Rosalena’s manual and material interventions into geological and astrological data as acts of feminist and anti-colonial resistance on a cosmological scale. Her artworks examine the geo-political effects of climate change, dispossession, artificial intelligence, and extractive industries and ideologies to imagine futures outside of these logics. The title of this exhibition, In All Directions, signals the expansiveness of the land and sky against the cartographic tools used for mapping and control. At the same time, it summons the potential held in non-linear temporalities by reorienting ourselves toward the infinite.

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Columbus Museum of Art website: 

https://www.columbusmuseum.org/sarah-rosalena-in-all-directions/

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Review Brooklyn Rail: 

https://brooklynrail.org/2024/02/artseen/Sarah-Rosalena-In-All-Directions