Comprising sculpture, painting, tapestries and other newly reimagined artistic media, her exhibition Synthetic Self, which spans across the Los Angeles galleries of Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, investigates subjects of paramount importance today at the intersection of environmental concerns, artificial intelligence and human creativity. Taken together, the works extend many of the concepts in Saban’s practice over nearly two decades, including the connection between analog and digital tools and approaches, while also introducing others for the first time.

Synthetic Self also includes a new body of work that—true to the artist’s practice—plays with and reworks traditional art media to generate unconventional objects. Beginning with a thick layer of white encaustic (a pliable paint made from beeswax and tree resin), Saban next applies a thin layer of either oil pastel or graphite; she then carves this surface by hand or using a high-tech laser-cutting machine.

Large-scale panels entitled Flow Charts probe what it takes to make a drawing, imagining the complex moves and decisions necessary to render a landscape or portrait in a particular way—and how one teaches a machine to do the same. In their breakdown of the creative process, the works’ hand-drawn texts, arrows and diagrams explore an in-between space between human and computer, contemplating what lies ahead at this pivotal era of AI generation and metaverses, particularly for human creativity.

Viewers soon realize that the imagery on these figurative panels is riddled with errors—extra fingers, altered facial features, upside-down elements, repeating forms—which mimic AI glitches. Several include a grid overlay that invokes pixilation and references the way in which the world is so frequently mediated by screens and dots-per-inch.

The specter of the fan returns in a suite of new works on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, in which rows of fans, as well as a series of historical computer graphics cards, appear on sheets of paper and wood veneers. Carved with the same digital laser-cutting machine, these electronic forms have remnants of burnt cotton and cellulose fibers at their edges.

A group of panel-based works effects a different kind of juxtaposition: atop the natural textures of ash burl appear the angular geometries of computer circuits, rendered in thick printer’s ink. The swirls of the wood grain evoke smoke, and the tactile quality of the ink—black and tarlike—recalls the stickiness of petrol. Like other works in Synthetic Self, what is natural and manmade, extracted and manufactured, is inextricably entwined.

Across its series and locations, Synthetic Self taps into the trappings of our particular moment, in which developing systems of thought, computation and creation are ushering in both new horizons and new anxieties over the power of artificial intelligence and the environmental results of human industry alike. Rather than offering any judgments or forecasts, Saban instead winds these numerous threads together, proposing hybrid forms, materials and frameworks through which to consider these concerns—with depth as well as levity.