Sarah Meyohas

Petals cannot digitize themselves. Human hands must individually open the flower, pick the petal, place it under the lens, press the shutter, and upload the image to the cloud. Then again, and again, and again.

In August 2016, 10,000 roses were placed in the atrium of the former Bell Labs. The work of photographing the individual petals and turning them into a dataset was performed by sixteen men. The digital images of petals, all one hundred thousand, were used as inputs for an artificial neural network which learned to generate new, unique petals forever.

From this performance results the 30 minute film Cloud of Petals on display, alongside an installation of photographs.

In defiance of two brokerage firms closing her accounts, Sarah Meyohas will also present a new painting from her Stock Performance series.

Meyohas trades on the New York Stock Exchange, placing orders with the purpose of visual change. Once she affects a stock’s valuation, Meyohas announces the change in market capitalization and records the shift with oil stick. Marks accumulate in a gestural record of the stock’s performance. The line, value over time, is an index of her movement, physically in the gallery and virtually in her ownership. Each painting is one of many financial records, but unique as an artwork.

Following her Stock Performance at 303 Gallery, Charles Schwab and TD Ameritrade cancelled her brokerage accounts without explanation. To commemorate this event, the letters have been engraved into crystal awards. The trophies are on display for their inaugural viewing.

BIOGRAPHY
In her work across media, Sarah Meyohas (French-American, born 1991) uses networks of information, power, value, and communication. Most spaces are shaped by the flow of desire through matrices of thought; this is the site of her work.

Her 2015 cryptocurrency Bitchcoin and recent Stock Performance at 303 Gallery in New York have been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Wired, Vice, Fortune, Artspace, and The Atlantic, and she has appeared on CNBC, PBS, and CBC. She recently been selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Meyohas holds a B.A. in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in finance from the Wharton School, and in 2015 received an M.F.A. from Yale University. Her home in New York is her eponymously named gallery.