This film Sarah Rosalena: In All Directions, features Exit Points and Standard Candle by Sarah Rosalena. Rosalena’s practice is rooted in her lineage of women weavers who used a variety of looms and Indigenous technologies such as beaded looms, manual hand looms, and the digital Jacquard loom. Her LACMA Art + Technology Lab project Exit Points intertwines machine learning, coded language, and the loom to challenge technological norms through a feminist and anti-colonial lens. In her subsequent exhibition Standard Candle, woven textiles are informed by astronomical images reflecting the labor of women “computers,” highlighting their crucial role in shaping Western scientific knowledge and space imaging. With support from the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, Rosalena collaborated with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to conduct her research.

Sarah Rosalena is a recipient of the 2019 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant. Inspired by the spirit of LACMA's original Art and Technology program (1967–71), which paired artists with technology companies in Southern California, the LACMA Art + Technology Lab supports artist experiments with emerging technology. The LACMA Art + Technology Lab is presented by Hyundai Motor.

Sarah Rosalena is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist working between traditional handicraft traditions and emerging technology. Throughout her career, Rosalena has built a reputation for breaking boundaries through her hybrid forms rooted in indigenous cosmologies, re-interpreted through digital tools and her hand. Her experimental practice reconsiders craft in the context of art history and technology and suggests new possibilities as we attempt to define ourselves to innovation and computation. Born from multi-generations of women weavers, she works from her digital Jacquard loom to her mother’s bead loom, mixing hand-dyed natural colors, including cochineal and indigo, with a synthetic, pixelated palette to produce her unbordered textiles. Programming her 3D ceramic printer to imitate coil pot techniques, she fabricates “anti-vessels” that mimic the patterns of weaving and basketry. Working with image software, she creates beadwork–pixel per bead–whose surface mimics the computer screen.

Rosalena is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award, the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Artadia Award, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology, and the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Art Prize. She has had solo exhibitions with LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Clockshop, and Blum & Poe Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collection at LACMA, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art.