BY SARAH CASCONE
Since breaking into the art world with her cryptocurrency art project BitchCoin a decade ago, the artist Sarah Meyohas (b. 1991) has become known for her high-tech, multidisciplinary works. So, it may come as a surprise that the 34-year-old recently unveiled her first public art installation, and it is a monumental, meditative curved structure illuminated solely by the rays of the desert sun.
“I have never done anything remotely like this,” Meyohas admitted to me.
The piece is a commission for the 2025 edition of Desert X, the fifth outing for the public art biennial curated by Neville Wakefield in California’s Coachella Valley. And yes, there is more to the work than meets the eye: just because Meyohas isn’t plugging the work into a humming generator doesn’t mean there isn’t some seriously cutting-edge technology powering the project.
Set on the side of the road in Palm Desert, amid the sparsely vegetated sands, the work unfurls like a ribbon, a pathway rising up from the ground to become an undulating wall that you can walk beside. Nestled in each serpentine curve is a mirrored disc planted in the ground, reflecting sunbeams onto the white wall—but almost by magic, the light has been manipulated, so that it forms patterns and messages, revealing the work’s title, Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams.
The effect is so crisp and clean that it takes a moment to realize how remarkable it is. The rays of the sun, bouncing off a mirrored surface that’s been milled to absolute precision, and reflecting a legible message—no projections, no animations, no lens. It’s achieved through the magic of caustics.
It’s okay if you have no idea what that is. I didn’t either.
“The simplest example that you know of is the patterns at the bottom of a swimming pool,” Meyohas explained. “The light moving, getting distorted through the water? That’s caustics.”
The artist always has her ear to the ground, learning about new technologies and imagining artistic applications for them. So when she heard about a Swiss professor who had co-founded a company called Rayform, based on his ability to calculate caustics, Meyohas was intrigued.
“It’s a pretty complicated computation—they’re the only ones who can do it,” she said. “But they only had a tiny sample that was like, the size of an inch.”
Exploring the limits of caustics was the first thing that came to mind when Desert X approached Meyohas. But she knew from experience that making art using new technology has its challenges—the unknown potential is always what intrigues, but the visuals won’t necessarily deliver like they will with a tried-and-tested medium like paint.
“I have a lot of failed experiments that don’t see the light of day,” Meyohas said. “Often, I run up against a limitation that then makes it kind of underwhelming or not expressive enough. It’s like, ‘oh, this is like a nice science trick.'”
Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams was one of those rare occasions where the technology was able to deliver in person on the vision in her head. The work is pushing the new caustics technology to its limits, creating the biggest reflectors Rayform had ever calculated. (The wall structure, crafted from foam covered in acrylic and stucco, was able to give the work a monumentality that isn’t yet physically possible with the reflectors alone.)
“I had nerves that we’d show up and the reflectors might not work as planned,” Meyohas said.
Visitors to the artwork are able to manipulate the work’s six metal discs themselves, capturing the light of the sun and watching as it is transformed into a legible image as it hits the walls. The result feels like a mirage, the words and images shimmering improbably, almost like water hidden in the desert.
“I had a little kind of gut feeling that if I started using this technology indoors with artificial light, it wouldn’t convey the technical prowess,” Meyohas said. “The only way I wanted to do this would be outdoors with the sun. Then, you’re tapping into a whole other language of Land Art, sundials, the Nazca lines, and being connected to this sort of celestial equation, rather than just pointing flashlights.”
There have been a lot of Meyohas experiments, both failed and successful—including holographic roses—since the last time I interviewed the artist on the occasion of “Cloud of Petals,” her 2017 solo show at the now-defunct Red Bull Arts in New York.
That data-driven display featured virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and 100,000 rose petals, hand-picked and sorted in a massive project at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. (The looming mid-century Eero Saarinen-designed complex was in the process of being converted into a mixed-use complex called Bell Works, and has since served as the set of the Apple TV hit Severance.)
In the years since, I knew Meyohas had come to be regarded as a pioneer in the NFT space, with BitchCoin understood as an early precursor to NFT art. But when I bumped into her in February at my coworker Ben Davis’s birthday party, at Honey’s—a Brooklyn mead bar that she happens to co-own with fellow artist Arley Marks, known for his glassware designs—it was clear we had a lot to catch up on.
In addition to Honey’s, Meyohas and Marks also own 102 Franklin, an event space and private dining room in Tribeca. Beyond hospitality, she has ventured into Hollywood, serving as executive producer for the 2024 film The Brutalist, which won three Oscars.
Meyohas is also a venture capitalist, investing in numerous tech start-ups—including serving as a founder to one in the field of women’s health that she isn’t quite ready to talk about. (With degrees from both the Yale School of Art in Connecticut and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, it should come as no surprise that Meyohas has a head for both business and art.)
Sarah Meyohas, BITCHCOIN, Public Key: B5FHa2ufgSMi9fwtToFaEUo1mF9ChPd5J.
As NFTs exploded onto the scene, the artist issued a new BitchCoin release on Ethereum in 2021, backing each token with one of the 3,291 pressed rose petals from the “Cloud of Petals” series. (The original 200 were mined on the Bitcoin blockchain.)
BitchCoin made its auction debut at Phillips New York in May 2021 as part of that relaunch. There, a set of 160 of the tokens sold for $113,400, and a group of 80 for $81,900, according to the Artnet Price Database. A few months later, a single token sold on NFT marketplace OpenSea for 6.15 ETH ($20,114.19)—although post-NFT bubble, the most recent sale, in February, was just 0.15 ETH ($454).
Meyohas isn’t particularly troubled by the cool-off in the NFT market, and the end of the days where prices for artist exploded into the millions overnight. After all, that isn’t the type of career trajectory one can expect in the art world.
Installation view of “Sarah Meyohas: Infinite Petals” at Fellowship, London.
“People who had misconceptions about what art can be as an asset class are probably disappointed,” she admitted. “But NFTs are closer to reality now. Now, it’s just a method of distributing work digitally.”
In fact, Meyohas also has a new NFT collection dropping April 15, as part of her new show “Infinite Petals” at Fellowship, a London gallery for artists working with innovative technology.
Taking “Cloud of Petals” as its starting point, Meyohas used the 100,000 individual rose petals from that project as a data set. She trained a generative adversarial network, or GAN, on the photographs of each individual petal, which then generated an infinite set of unique rose petals.
Back in 2017, Meyohas used GAN technology, then in its infancy, to create a virtual reality film featuring an endless swirl of digitally generated petals. The new “Infinite Petals” NFT collection features morphing, ever-changing digital rose petals, arranged in neat grids.
“We are creating these patterns mathematically and then rendering them out of the model,” Meyohas said. “One of the pieces has 73,000 individual, unique petal images that are stitching together into essentially an insane stop motion animation.”
Individual petals will be available for 0.05 ETH ($83) on OpenSea. There will be an auction of 100 20-by-20 grids of petals that can be purchased with a unique Meyohas print of the image. (There’s also a one-of-one 13-minute video, the collection’s “grail” artwork, available by inquiry.)
“I do want a good result with the sale,” Meyohas said. “Because the biggest artists in the NFT space, sales-wise, they’re all men. There’s not one woman.”
She is right: The list of the most expensive NFTs hasn’t changed much since we published our most recent version in June 2022 (the only addition would be the $52.7 million The Clock by Pak and Julian Assange). Then, as now, the entire list is male artists. (Although Meyohas has certainly gotten her own flowers—no pun intended—with the Centre Pompidou in Paris acquiring BitchCoin for its collection in 2023.)
“There are women artists who do really well, but in the NFT space, there really aren’t,” Meyohas added. “I want the petals to do well, just for that purpose in the art world.”
Last time I spoke to Meyohas, she was sure that her work with roses had run its course. Eight years later, she views “Infinite Petals” as the final chapter in this body of work, but “never say never,” she said. “In five years, if we’re still talking about rose petals, like would that be so wrong?”
But even if she does find new avenues down which to take her petals, Meyohas will clearly have plenty of other projects keeping her busy—including, hopefully, finding a permanent home for Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams.
It’s an artwork that she hopes will resonate with viewers not just through its visual appearance, and the impressive nature of the underlying technology, but also through its titular message. In an age where the truth can be endlessly debated, Meyohas believes there are indisputable facts and truth—but that those can be tricky to identify, even in the full light of day.
“Light is interesting. Light reveals the world to you and gives you an account of space.But light can also be bent, distorted, refracted, a mirage…” Meyohas said. “That is where this phrase, ‘truth arrives in slanted beams,’ emerged. It’s about how the truth is something that you really have to look for. I’m trying to do that with the piece, and create a truth. I want it to be a spiritual encounter for people.”
“Sarah Meyohas: Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams” is on view at 74184 Portola Road, Palm Desert, California, as part of Desert X in Coachella Valley, California, March 8–May 11.
“Sarah Meyohas: Infinite Petals” is on view at Fellowship, Westbourne Park Road, Notting Hill, W11, London, United Kingdom, April 10–25.
