Clockshop is pleased to present a new publication of artist Sarah Rosalena’s recent commission For Submersion, which features an essay by Nora N. Khan and a layer of augmented reality which extends the physical installation. Please join us for a launch party at Clockshop on Friday, June 9 from 6–7:30 PM. All attendees will receive a complimentary copy of the book. Light refreshments will be provided. At 6:30 Artist Sarah Rosalena will be joined by artist Mercedes Dorame in a conversation that will illuminate the digital and physical processes of making the site-specific work to reorient the LA State Historic Park as an original watershed of the river by centering Indigenous craft and narratives. Dorame’s sculpture, ‘Pulling the Sun Back — Xa’aa Peshii Nehiino Taamet,’ which was installed at LA State Historic Park from October 2021 to January 2022, contextualized the landscape through experiential cosmologies of community and ceremony rooted in Tongva traditions and future-making

For Submersion: Sarah Rosalena Publication Release
RSVP Below
Friday June 9, 2023
6-7:30PM
6:30 Conversation with Mercedes Dorame and Sarah Rosalena
2806 Clearwater St, Los Angeles, CA 90039

If you can’t attend but would still like to purchase a copy you can do so here.

Sarah Rosalena’s conceptual attention to the disruption of colonial systems using the embodied memory at the heart of Indigenous craft is at the fore of For Submersion. As the work unsettles technological narratives of dominance and extraction, the forthcoming publication takes up and expands this same mantle.

Print as a medium treads the intersection between documentation and an expansion into the experiential through augmented reality, complicating the relation between analog and digital. The land is recalled in its many physical and digital encodings—from the satellites operating in the language of surveillance to the .xl file of the historic courses of the Los Angeles River, Payme Paxaayt, to the digitally fabricated sculpture situated in the flooded wetland of Los Angeles State Historic Park. Within these pages, Rosalena’s practice expands to contain these multiple realities as though they were gravitationally unbound parts. 

The publication For Submersion: Sarah Rosalena features essays by Clockshop’s Executive Director Sue Bell Yank and writer Nora N. Khan.

Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Los Angeles. Her work deconstructs technology with material interventions, creating new narratives for hybrid objects that function between human/nonhuman, ancient/future, and handmade/autonomous to override power structures rooted in colonialism. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at UC Santa Barbara in Computational Craft and Haptic Media. She has received awards from Creative Capital; the LACMA Art + Tech Lab; Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation; the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo; the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology; and the Craft Futures Grant from the Center for Craft. Rosalena recently showed her work at Frieze LA and Blum & Poe Gallery.

For Submersion was commissioned by Clockshop and supported through our long-standing partnership with California State Parks. The production of this work was generously supported by the California Arts Council, Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, and the Pasadena Art Alliance, with additional support from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, and Clockshop’s generous community of supporters. Special thanks to Arktura for their donation of services to fabricate this project. 

The publication For Submersion: Sarah Rosalena was supported in part by the University of California, Santa Barbara.  

Augmented Reality: An Art App
Design: Studio Iguana
Printed by Nocaut, Mexico City

Explore For Submersion in AR here. 

Nora N. Khan is a curator, editor, and writer of criticism on digital visual culture, the politics of software, and philosophy of emerging technology. She is the Executive Director of Project X for Art and Criticism, publishing X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal in Los Angeles. Khan’s short books are Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail) on the logic of machine vision, and Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information), co-written with Steven Warwick. Forthcoming are No Context: AI Art, Machine Learning, and the Stakes for Art Criticism (Lund Humphries), Kingdom (Primary Information), and The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole). Her writing has been honored by the Visual Arts Foundation, the Crossed Purposes Foundation, and a Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art.

Mercedes Dorame was born in Los Angeles, California, and received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her undergraduate degree from UCLA. She calls on her Tongva ancestry to engage the problematics of (in)visibility and ideas of cultural construction.