The Brooklyn Rail

Sarah Rosalena’s exhibition at the Columbus Museum of Art at the Pizzuti, In All Directions, sets out to make and break patterns. Motifs repeat throughout: stars, spirals, fluted horns, hourglasses, rings, and rectangles. These shapes emerge and reemerge across woven textile and coiled clay, glass beads and smoked stoneware. But their rhythmic regularity is disrupted by the friction wrought by medial translation: from pixel to thread, concept to image, space to time, extraterrestrial matter to its earthly equivalents. A weaver and a coder (the artist learned the Wixárika handloom technique from her grandmother and got into computing when it was still countercultural, in 1990s LA), Rosalena exploits these intertwined logics and the roots of computation in Jacquard loom punch-cards to unearth far more capacious and insidious entanglements. Her work attests to how the violent displacement and eradication of indigenous people, the enclosure and exploitation of land, and the devaluation of craft traditions and female labor are all intimate yet invisible conditions for our contemporary technologies and image economy. Rosalena materializes these histories and revives their antagonisms in tensions between material, shape, process, and archival source. Pattern recognition becomes a strategy for its own undoing.

This dynamic plays out in the large central room where the two-sided textiles in the series “Above Below” (2020) hang suspended from the ceiling, interspersed with the 3D-printed ceramic vessels of “Transposing a Form” (2020). “Above Below” is comprised of four Jacquard-loom renditions of computer-generated images of Mars’s surface (translated at the scale of one pixel per thread). The red, blue, black, and white weave simulates the swirls of light and shadow characteristic of photographs of land masses taken from the sky. These forms are at once familiar and in need of explanation. We learn from the wall text that to get these patterns, Rosalena trained a neural network with satellite images of the Red Planet’s surface and then incorporated data about climate change on Earth to project probable futures on Mars. The amalgamation of past, present, and future, other planets and our own, takes on unique form in fabric: because they are hung from the ceiling, we’re able to see how the verso repeats the woven pattern with the opposite color scheme. One side primarily red and the other principally blue, the tapestries in “Above Below” literalize how resources required to render Mars habitable (its “blue-ing”) results in the “reddening” of earth. The artworks make this reality readily visible—the tapestries are exquisitely luminous—and, at the same time, difficult to see. The abstract composition and fuzzy resolution work together to insist on the limits of agency and understanding when we as individuals confront the vast scale of planetary space and geological time.

The sculptures in “Transposing a Form” further concretize how space exploration—real and imagined—continues colonial enclosure and climate devastation on Earth. These 3D-printed, coiled ceramics are created with Mars regolith supplement, an iron-rich clay considered to approximate Mars’s uniquely gritty surface, but which actually comes from Earth in areas like the base of volcanoes in Hawaii and California’s Mojave Desert. While the material of “Transposing a Form” shows the extractive logic governing our relationship to even physically inaccessible space, their shapes (fluted horns, nested petals) invoke both the tradition of basket-weaving and the centripetal structure of black holes. The colonial logic of the material (in which Mars=Earth) contrasts with the capacious shape (the horn) that encompasses multiple references that work together without collapse. They demonstrate how a single shape can contain multitudes, and how analogies can variably erase difference and, in other instances, allow us to better attend to them.

“Transposing a form” thus serves as a kind of interpretive key to the exhibition. The materials prompt our thoughts to go elsewhere, beyond the present exhibition to notional multiversal histories. At the same time, these references to alternate times and places bring us back to the space of the exhibition, attuning us to the political implications of how and what we see. Expanding Axis and Exit VAR! (both 2022) achieve this with stunning efficiency. Expanding Axis is a set of ten palm-sized, black-and-white weavings that Rosalena made by hand with thin translucent thread and tiny glass beads. These are laid out horizontally, glistening and gorgeous, on a light table. Exit VAR! is displayed in the same way but separately, the beaded rectangle elongated by lengthy, spindly strands that extend from the bottom edge, like jellyfish tentacles or the tail of a shooting star. Each beaded weaving is a reproduction of a glass-plate image captured by the Hooker 100-inch telescope, the most powerful in the world from 1917 to 1949. Exit VAR! shows the most famous, the 1923 picture of Andromeda that, thanks to calculations of its distance from the Milky Way, demonstrated that other galaxies existed beyond our own. This discovery is usually attributed exclusively to Edwin Hubble. But the glass plates remind us otherwise: their hand-scratched markups attest to the involved work done by female “computers,” who analyzed the faint traces of starlight and translated this into information about our position within the universe. Rosalena’s laborious handiwork rematerializes this collective labor of calculation and insists on its creative, intellectual aspects, invoking affinities among weaving, computing, and the act of interpretation. This nexus is particularly present here, since the curatorial strategy is a collaborative effort among the museum, professor of art history Kris Paulsen, and students in a graduate seminar. The pedagogical ethos is further iterated in the show’s catalogue, which includes essays by Paulsen, students, and scholar/activist Elizabeth A. Povinelli, as well as an interview between Rosalena and theorist Kathryn Yusoff. The publication serves as a useful resource as well as an archive of the conversations and community that are conditions for the artworks and their display.

The history of exploitation, erasure, and creative work all embedded within our images and ideas of the universe reverberates throughout the second floor of the exhibition. Three black, white, and shimmering gray tapestries, all titled Standard Candle (two from 2021 and one from 2023), take inspiration from the algorithm developed by astronomer and Harvard-lab researcher Henrietta Swan Leavitt in the 1910s. Her invention enabled investigators like Hubble to calculate the relative distance of intergalactic entities with newfound accuracy. The rippling wave-like patterns of Standard Candle invoke the frequency of starlight that human computers would analyze using Leavitt’s algorithm. To untrained eyes, their opacity dazzles, suggesting the skill required to make them meaningful, the expertise involved in turning dizzying abstractions into orientation.

The next room, enveloped in darkness, shifts our attention to another element of these images and the extractive logic that made them possible. Here hangs another series of textiles reproducing the patterns of the Hooker telescope glass plates. They are woven with cotton, paper, nylon, and UV reactive yarn so that they glow under black light. This logic—how darkness serves as the condition of possibility for visibility—reiterates the technical requirements of the telescope, which needed an area unaffected by light pollution. This is what propelled the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles housing the telescope to be sited on unceded Indigenous (Tongva) land in the San Gabriel Mountains.

There is another effect of all these reversals, two-sided tapestries, and inverted logics. Rosalena uses abstraction alternately as a powerful mode of representation capable of conjuring repressed histories and to call attention to the limits of representation. Analogies among different entities suggest more ethical ways of relating and threaten to eradicate difference, to discipline the unknown by rendering it akin to something known. There is a way that the power of materials to attest to history is the center of this exhibition, while also continually dissolving and undermining itself. Transposition never happens without transformation, so we must grapple with what is lost and what is gained in each case. Materialization and metaphor are necessary but imperfect. All these tapestries fray at the edges, and vessels—open on both ends—fail to contain.