Sarah Meyohas

Sarah Meyohas deconstructs the rose down to its petal, isolating that most basic unit as a way to refigure the binary language of digital communication: on or off, one or zero, a series of pulses through wires, populating servers and filling the cloud. Only through the act of metaphor can such vast and boundless networks be given visual form. Meyohas’ Infinite Void seeks to manifest the unending chasm of our digital platforms.

Cloud of Petals VR, presents the artist’s metaphorical network of petals across multiple worlds. Placed within the blank void of the digital plane, digital 3D animated petals fall like rain around the viewer in one world, or travel in an eternal cylindrical tube in another. The pixelated images are immersive, comforting, and dreamlike. They evoke physical, embodied processes such as memory and sensual perception, while also being representative of an unbounding language of code capable of navigating every aspect of the infinite space that is our digital world.

In his book, New Dark Age, the artist James Bridle identifies the key component of man-machine relations as being a “faith in the network, as mode of seeing, thinking, and acting.” Such faith actively “denies the bonds of time, place, and individual experience.” In stripping away the petals from their accustomed place within the natural world and placing them in the virtual space as representations of a digital system, Meyohas produces a visual language for what Bridle defines as a dependence on the network. Cloud of Petals VR immerses the viewer within what is otherwise an invisible system.

Meyohas’ quest to make the invisible visible continues in the ongoing Speculations series, which represents the boundless of the digital world using specular tactics. The photographic work heightens the void-like effect captured from two mirrors facing one another. Staged with foliage, canvas, and/or obscured figures, the unending visual illusion pulls the viewer into its limitlessness. Described by Meyohas as a “stasis, made of a constant exchange and a series of [specular] relations that never find a definitive end,” the photographs transcend the two dimensional plane, transporting the viewer as if through a portal.

Tangentially themed shadow boxes with items such as maps, shells, mables, and clay pipes by Joseph Cornell, a self taught artist and filmmaker, enact a gateway into the artist’s enclosed world. Kenneth Goldsmith defines Cornell’s boxes as an interface, one with in-built “operating and navigation systems through which we may experience it.” He goes on to draw a parallel between Cornell’s subdivided boxes and computer technology, specifically the layout of desktop “windows.” Not unlike Cornell’s boxes, Speculations casts a visual spell strongly reminiscent of what it means to exist and navigate within digital platforms.

Whether in virtual reality or photography, the unending replication of the plant, flower, and or petal within an infinite plane enacts the experience of our digitized and endlessly categorized reality. By using the natural world as her references, network as her medium, and the specular as her mode of contemplation, Meyohas’ Infinite Void offers a timely and aesthetically stunning depiction of the growing darkness that is our technological dependence.

Pact with Julia Greenway

Sarah Meyohas (French-American, born in 1991) explores networks of information, power, value, and communication across media.

Meyohas holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in Finance from the Wharton School. In 2015 she received an M.F.A. in Photography from Yale University. She lives and works between London and New York.

Exhibiting internationally, her film Cloud of Petals has been screened at various festivals, including; the Brooklyn Film Festival, TimesTalk New York, CogX, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and the Slamdance Film Festival. Recently, she was featured in the public talks of the Locarno Film Festival.

In 2017, Sarah Meyohas was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 and has appeared on CNBC, PBS, and CBC. Her work is often featured in such publications as; The New York Times, Artforum, Vice, Time, Wired, Fortune, Whitewall, T Magazine, Nowness, The Atlantic, Bloomberg View, i-D, AnOther, The Cut, Wallpaper, and Harpers Bazaar. She appeared on the cover of the 20th Anniversary Edition of Flaunt Magazine, Fall 2018.

Meyohas had solo shows at 303 Gallery, New York in 2016, Galerie Pact, Paris, Independent Régence, Brussels, RedBull Arts Studios, New York in 2017, at Disjecta Contemporary, Portland and at Wasserman Projects, Detroit in 2018. Her work was also part of various group exhibitions, at Aperture Foundation in 2015, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Fisher Parrish, New York and Galerie Pact in 2017, at the Open Space Contemporary of London in 2018 etc.