SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Casemore Gallery presents Automata Sigils, opening June 27, 5-8 pm. This exhibition assembles six women artists whose work engages technological systems, coded structures, and historical apparatuses to offer conceptual perspectives on craft and design.

The title of the exhibition is taken from two seemingly opposed ideas: the automaton and the sigil. One suggests programmed action, mechanical repetition, and systems of control; the other invokes symbols, rituals, and the production of meaning through belief. Moving between these poles, the artists in Automata Sigils creatively repurpose historical and present day technologies and materials such as a Jacquard loom, steel mobiles, 1970s computer paper, ulexite crystal, archival photography, and digital video manipulation to transform these tools into sites of speculation and enchantment.

The exhibition is anchored by pioneering conceptual artist Sonya Rapoport’s monumental piece Journey (1976) from her large-scale series of Yarn Drawings. This work exemplifies her groundbreaking fusion of technology, art, and psychology. Created on continuous-feed computer printout paper sourced from UC Berkeley laboratories, the work combines graphite, colored pencil, ink stamps, and stitched yarn to create a personal feminist symbolic language embedded within the visual structures of early computing.​

Carmen Winant's steel mobiles assemble images from 1970s instructional manuals on weaving, pottery, puppetry, and other craft traditions. By fragmenting and reconfiguring these archives, Winant highlights the precarious transmission of knowledge associated with domesticity and feminist production.

​Questions of gender and representation continue to arise in Ariella Robinson's trio of arabesque quilted works, which also draw from historical women's magazines and archival imagery. Her work reframes scenes of intimacy and carnal desire through her self-embellished experimental approach to textile processes traditionally associated with mechanized utility. Robinson examines the ways decorative forms can both reveal and obscure systems of power through the retelling of feminist narratives and the reconstitution of familiar form.

Similarly, Mia Weiner's handwoven tapestries engage the technological history embedded within textile production itself. Produced on a Jacquard loom—the nineteenth-century invention whose punch-card system would later influence early computing—her works translate her own photographs of intimate gestures into woven surfaces. These works merge the artist’s personal lens with broader discourse on the power dynamics found between queerness and technology.

Prominently featured is Billie Ocean's immersive faux Faraday cage, lined with bubble wrap and containing an instructional video. An anonymous captain invites the passenger on a hypnotic journey with a series of questions as computer code, black holes, and DNA endlessly spin in the distance. Blending horror, fantasy, and ASMR aesthetics, Ocean transforms a structure designed for protection into a portal for contemplation and uncertainty.

​Kelley O'Leary's resin-based works likewise navigate the intersection of illusion and the sacred. Incorporating literal debris from SpaceX Starship flight tests and ulexite—a mineral whose optical properties resemble those of fiber-optic transmission—her pieces function simultaneously as both speculative artifacts and critiques of contemporary myths surrounding technological progress.

In Automata Sigils, technological systems are approached from an aesthetic, feminine, and conceptual perspective, morphing beyond mere functionality. Together, these works serve as symbolic frameworks for constructing individual meaning in an increasingly automated world.