glass beads, nylon thread
4 x 6 in.
© Sarah Rosalena
photo © Museum Associates/LACMA
photo credit: Ian Byers-Gamber
Standard Candle
Standard Candle
Sarah Rosalena
Sarah Rosalena
Staged in Mount Wilson Observatory’s 100-inch Hooker telescope, Standard Candle uses instrumentation and darkness as a lens for examining women’s labor and colonialism, and their role in the advancement of western scientific thought and the imaging of space from unceded Tongva land. Standard Candle features a series of woven and beaded textiles made using computer code and based on images captured by the 100-inch telescope. The exhibition is organized around a body of work developed by the artist in response to the labor of female “computers”—women who worked at observatories undertaking the painstaking tasks of graphing data and performing calculations and predictions using glass plate photographic images. The black box exhibition explores this labor through process, material, and observation to generate knowledge and reorient the origins of scientific discovery.
Standard Candle premiered at Mount Wilson Observatory, presented by LACMA, in Los Angeles, CA from May 20–June 18, 2023.
Craft, Digital Media, Technology, Visual Arts
2022
About Sarah Rosalena
Los Angeles, CA
Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika) is an interdisciplinary artist and weaver based in Los Angeles. Her work deconstructs technology with material interventions, creating new narratives for hybrid objects that function between human/nonhuman, ancient/future, handmade/autonomous, beyond power structures rooted in colonialism. They collapse binaries and borders, creating new epistemologies between Earth and Space. She is Assistant Professor of Art at UC Santa Barbara in Computational Craft and Haptic Media. She is a recipient of the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Marciano Art Foundation Artadia Award, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology, the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Art Prize, and the Craft Futures Grant from Center for Craft. She has presented her work at LACMA, Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Clockshop, Frieze LA, and Blum & Poe Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika) is an interdisciplinary artist and weaver based in Los Angeles. Her work deconstructs technology with material interventions, creating new narratives for hybrid objects that function between human/nonhuman, ancient/future, handmade/autonomous, beyond power structures rooted in colonialism. They collapse binaries and borders, creating new epistemologies between Earth and Space. She is Assistant Professor of Art at UC Santa Barbara in Computational Craft and Haptic Media. She is a recipient of the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Marciano Art Foundation Artadia Award, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology, the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Art Prize, and the Craft Futures Grant from Center for Craft. She has presented her work at LACMA, Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Clockshop, Frieze LA, and Blum & Poe Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.