In February 2015, Sarah Meyohas launched a social token, Bitchcoin, a cryptocurrency which could be exchanged in perpetuity for her work. Meyohas backed each original Bitchcoin with a five-inch by five-inch portion of her Speculations photographs.

These works, created through the manipulation of physical reflective surfaces in a traditional photographic studio set-up, portrayed perspectival tunnels extending into infinity. Functioning as a visual and poetic interpretation of the blockchain technology itself, they held up a mirror to the alchemical ways in which value is created by the artistic gesture and embodied in art as a financial asset.

Artist Bio:

Conceptual artist Sarah Meyohas (b. 1991, New York, NY) considers the production of value, the nature of exchange, and the romantic resonance of the sublime in a practice that seeks 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. Her vivid imagery makes reference to myriad motifs of art history—from the echoes of classical fascination in the nude female form and the romantic allure of the natural world to the meticulous shapes and colors of geometric abstraction. Subjecting this imagery to various alchemical processes—both analog and digital—Meyohas produces an intelligible visual language that articulates the complex operations that increasingly govern our world: analog technology mimics the digital; rose petals, aggregately identical but individually unique, comprise a dataset for their AI-produced equivalents; Bitchcoin, a cryptocurrency backed by physical artworks, questions the speculative value of currency and the ineffable value of art. Meditative, contemplative, and intimate, Meyohas’s work makes visible the constructs that underlie contemporary society.

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.

Meyohas’s ambitious 16mm film Cloud of Petals, two Bitchcoin NFTs, and an original Bitchcoin certificate were acquired by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France in 2023. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK; the Warehouse, Dallas, TX; 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 W Magazine, Whitewall, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times, Vice, and Artforum, and has appeared on CNBC, PBS, and CBC. She has also been invited to participate in panel discussions at Centre Pompidou, Paris, Frane; Art Basel, Switzerland; the New Museum, New York, NY; and the Locarno International Film Festival, Locarno, Switzerland, among others. 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.