New York based artist Sarah Meyohas wants to make art that has a “truth to it”. That’s no mean feat in today’s commerce-led art world, but you can’t blame an artist for trying. Don’t be fooled though: Meyohas is no idealist and her multifarious work has frequently veered into the troubling domain of the art market. In 2016 her project “Stock Performance” gained widespread attention, including that of French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud, whose seminal 1998 book Relational Aesthetics was an early influence on Meyohas. In this performatory piece, Meyohas traded stocks on the New York Stock exchange, and then drew the changes in each stock’s value on blank canvases mounted in New York’s 303 Gallery. In fact, Meyohas, who has a degree in economics, is keen to take the art market into her own hands: she runs an eponymously-titled gallery and has even developed her own cryptocurrency entitled, BitchCoin, where one BitchCoin will buy you 25 square inches of one of her photographic prints
If that all sounds like a lot to take in, that’s probably because it is. There’s nothing particularly straightforward about Meyohas’s work – the concepts that she touches upon are vast and difficult and rooted in the complexity of the contemporary moment. When asked how she would describe her work in her own words, she says that she’s interested in “systems” and “how we understand value and how that relates to representation”. According to Meyohas, “value is created through replacement, one is always in the place of another… in exchange”. These are some of the ideas explored in her enticing series of mirror photographs, “Speculations” – some of which are currently on sale in a new online art collection, co-curated by Absolut Art and The New York Times. Speaking to Meyohas prior to the collection’s unveiling at the inaugural TimesTalks Festival last weekend, she explains that these alluring images emerged from a thought process surrounding value and the nature of photography.
These mesmerising photographs centre on the infinite reflection of objects and effects, from an explosion of petals to wafts of pink-tinged smoke. Their realisation is the result of a “visual trick”, Meyohas confides: placing a two-way mirror, with one side covered in black salt, in front of another, wall-mounted mirror. The effect is one of escapism, she notes, “because the photo never achieves itself – the light is caught bouncing between the two mirrors and the exposure is never fully realised.” Meyohas is quick to confirm that there is no Photoshop or digital manipulation here. Instead, she regards it to be an honest approach to exactly what it is – “smoke and mirrors”.
But, for Meyohas, “Speculations” is more than just a trick of the eye. She considers her photographs to engage in deeper, meaningful questions around “the void” and “the sublime”, even dabbling in the very nature of our contemporary anxiety-ridden experience. “I was interested in making the photograph very explicitly seductive. Whether it’s the colours or the flowers drawing you in, I want viewers to feel like they’re being drawn into the void, like standing upon a precipice,” the artist explains. “There’s been a lot written about this kind of contemporary condition, whereby we’re so much better off than people were before us, and yet there’s so much anxiety, so much distrust and uncertainty nowadays… I see that in the photos”.
The uncertainty of our present moment is central to Meyohas’s work. Last year, she presented her first major exhibition at Red Bull Arts New York entitled, “Cloud of Petals”, which included a virtual reality experience. The project was demanding, drawing on artificial intelligence and big data, and circulating around one timeless image – the rose.
Beginning in the summer of 2016, the artist hired sixteen men, sourced from a temp agency, and positioned them in the former research site of Bell Labs, New Jersey. Over the course of several days, the artist filmed the men as they plucked the petals off roses and selected the ones that they deemed to be most beautiful. Their findings were then used to create a perfect petal, which was generated in virtual reality. Not only was the work a mediation on technology and the ways in which data can be used, but it also traversed the arena of gender politics. For Meyohas, there is no doubt about it: flowers represent the “feminine”, and in both “Cloud of Petals” and “Speculations”, the blooms act as locum for the female form. “A person wrote a line about ‘Cloud of Petals’ that caught me,” Meyohas expands.“She said that she couldn’t help but project her own body onto the flowers that were being plucked and stripped and handled, so it’s kind of a stand in for the female body, which is what I intended.”
In some ways it’s difficult to tie all the disparate aspects of Meyohas’s work together, but if there is a common motivating factor it is, as she confirms, the idea of “art holding a mirror up to the world, and showing and representing it to you”. What her work shows is the difficulty of locating truth and meaning in an anxious age of accelerated technology. Instead, Meyohas strives to go beyond this, towards a higher realm, one which is evocative, even sublime. As she states, “We’re constantly bombarded with lots of things, and I want to make work that makes you feel something, and making someone feel something with art is not always easy”.
The art collection co-curated Absolut Art and The New York Times debuted at the TimesTalk Festival, which ran April 13-15. The collection is available to purchase here.