Sarah Meyohas

Opening Reception: May 18, 6–8 PM

Marianne Boesky Gallery

509 West 24th Street, New York, NY

 

For sales inquiries, please contact Senior Director Kelly Woods:

kelly@boeskygallery.com

 

Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of New York-based conceptual artist Sarah Meyohas (b. 1991, New York, NY). Experimenting with complex uses of holographic and photographic technology, Meyohas expands upon her long-standing engagement with optics and perception and reveals a new fascination with anatomy. 

 

Throughout her practice, Meyohas considers the production of value, the nature of exchange, and the romantic resonance of the sublime while seeking to reveal the systems—both innate and manufactured—that govern contemporary society. Pairing a studied consideration of the unrealized potential of various technologies with a deft handling of analog artistic techniques, Meyohas produces work that is as conceptually rich as it is visually arresting. Investigating the intricacies of a broad range of media, including photography, film, holography, artificial intelligence, and the blockchain, Meyohas unearths potential connections among nature, culture, technology, and humanity. 

 

Meyohas debuts a new series—Diffractions—alongside new works from her ongoing Interferences series in the exhibition. Building on her ongoing experimentation with glass, technology, and the intersections therein, Diffraction #1 is a sculptural form comprising multiple glass panel diffraction gratings. Created by etching an image into glass at a rate of three thousand lines per millimeter—the opalescent object produces a kaleidoscopic array of colors when viewed from different angles. Much like holograms, diffraction gratings generate precise structural color—color produced by the interference of light waves with the microscopic structures etched into the glass. The snaking, sculptural form, combining overlapped and repeated images of the female form, evokes the organic nature of the body represented within. Eliciting a sense of movement and transformation reminiscent of early experimentation with movement in photography, Diffraction #1 reflects the continued influence of technological innovation on contemporary artistic expression—an ever-present theme in Meyohas’s work.

 

Alongside her novel experiments with diffraction gratings, the exhibition features new works from Meyohas’s ongoing Interferences series, including a monumental, multipanel hologram. Here, Meyohas layers the magnified imagery of plant matter of the early Interferences with images of the nude female form, laying bare the connections between plant matter and bodies as coexisting living organisms. At fourteen feet wide and comprising more than thirty trapezoidal panels, the new hologram, Interference #18, is perhaps her most explicit engagement yet with the complex dynamics of human life in an increasingly technological society. Fractured and flickering, this abstracted, sensorial experience of the body serves as a reminder that the natural world is its own form of technology.

 

Throughout her singular practice, Meyohas acts as artist, inventor, economist, and technologist. Constantly pushing technologies and processes beyond their understood limits to experiment with the yet-unrealized visual and sensory possibilities that lie within, her artistic experiments are often without precedent—the practical applications for the technical processes she tends to work in often only exist within the realms of the scientific or the economic. Meyohas’s work, then, is a perpetual state of returning these processes to nature, of unearthing the inherent connections between the organic and the technological. 

 

ABOUT SARAH MEYOHAS

Sarah Meyohas’s work—including her ambitious 16mm film Cloud of Petals, two Bitchcoin NFTs, and an original Bitchcoin certificate—was recently acquired by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, where it is currently on view in NFT: Poetics of the Immaterial from Certificates to Blockchains. Her work has also been exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY; the Barbican Centre, London, UK; the Jameel Arts Center, Dubai, UAE; and the Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai, China. Her immersive installation, Dawn Chorus was presented at the New Museum in 2020 and Rockefeller Center in 2022. 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. She has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times, Vice, and Artforum, and has appeared on CNBC, PBS, and CBC. In 2017 she was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Meyohas attended the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a BS in Finance from The Wharton School and a BA in International Relations. In 2015, Meyohas earned an MFA from Yale University. The artist lives and works in New York and London.