Sarah Meyohas
Sarah Meyohas is a conceptual artist whose practice considers the nature and capabilities of emerging technologies in contemporary society. Using the familiar emblems of biological life, Sarah investigates the complex operations that increasingly govern our world: soaring birds, created using augmented-reality software, flock in unison with the frenetic variations of the stock market; rose petals, aggregately identical but individually unique, comprise the dataset for their AI-created equivalents; Bitchcoin, a cryptocurrency backed by physical artworks, questions the speculative value of cryptocurrency and the ineffable value of art. Sarah creates an intelligible visual language to articulate the systems and technologies that increasingly influence our world.
Sarah is based in New York and holds dual degrees in Finance and International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania and in 2015 received her M.F.A. from Yale University.
Her work has been exhibited in New York at Red Bull Arts, 303 Gallery, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art and internationally at institutions including the Barbican Centre, London, the Jameel Arts Center, Dubai, and the Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai. She has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Vice, and Artforum, and has appeared on CNBC, PBS, and CBC. Her film Cloud of Petals has been screened at various film festivals around the world, including the Slamdance Film Festival and the Locarno Film Festival. In 2017 she was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list.
The analogy that created the endless loop: reflection is a metaphor for value. Value is created through replacement. In an exchange, one is in the place of the other. As a result, the metaphor of reflection goes both ways. For Plato, the material reality is the reflection of the ideal form, while for Marx, the price is the reflection of the commodity. The light is caught bouncing between mirrors in an endless exchange — a specular relation. The photographs are titled Speculations.
This series was initially conceived for BitchCoin, a cryptocurrency as an artwork that playfully constructed value. The coin needed to be backed by a photograph, and this photograph needed to create value visually, deliberately, and perhaps with an illusory expansion of space to reference “mining” and the idea of gold.
This series of photographs is ongoing. After all, these images literally never end. And while the themes of infinity, reflection, and illusion are conceptually vast, it is also the act of photographing — to look at a mirror and instead of seeing myself, seeing a void — that is metaphysical.
Price: £7,550
The petals are the documentation of the performance; materially limited and unique, they are the proof-of-work of Cloud of Petals. If one chooses to redeem their Bitchcoin for a physical relic, their coin will be destroyed, or “burned,” establishing the symbiotic value of token and backing. Each Bitchcoin token has a number on the back — the number of the worker, and the number of the petal selected. This number links each token to its unique petal. As each Bitchcoin is backed by a relic from this project, the value of the cryptocurrency is tied to the inarticulable value of art, continuing the symbiotic call and response that established Bitchcoin as one of the world’s earliest NFTs.
Price: £2,777