Entering Sarah Meyohas new exhibition at the Marianne Boesky gallery, you could be forgiven for thinking that the artist simply installed a number of pitch-black panes across the gallery. Walk past these mirrored panels, however, and they reveal mesmerizing three-dimensional images – a cluster of plants here, a fragment of a nude female form there – all tinged with iridescent hues. No, it’s not digital trickery, but the result of Meyohas’ continued adventures in holographic technology.
These new works are the “Rolls Royce version” of holograms, as Meyohas put it, technically known as diffraction gratings, devices with multi-lined or grooved surfaces that split light into its different wavelengths or colors. The resulting vibrant tones seen by the human eye are known as structural color, an occurrence which Meyohas recently found “religiously appealing”.
“Essentially any color that changes depending on your viewing angle is a structural color,” she told Artnet News. “The idea that a regular nanoscale shape or form could refract and create light and color across the visible spectrum, and the fact that light depends on your position was so beautiful to me.”
Sarah Meyohas, Interference #17 (2023) . Photo: Lance Brewer. © Sarah Meyohas. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen.
Its diffraction gratings, composing it in progress “interference” (2021-present), were created by machine-etching millions of microscopic lines on glass at a depth of 600 nanometers. This operation is so meticulous – stemming from “our desire to encode more and more information into smaller and smaller dots,” Meyohas said – that in fact, “we can create structural color that is more precise than what nature creates.
It is therefore fitting that the artist’s grids were engraved from his silver photographs of supernatural flora, offering a frontal collision between nature and technology. (Meyo also considered water droplets and spider webs as subjects, except the former was difficult to execute and she didn’t want to breed spiders for the latter.)
Sarah Meyohas, Interference #19 (2023). Photo: Lance Brewer. © Sarah Meyohas. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen.
“I didn’t want to model. I didn’t want to put something that could be repeated, ”she explained. “It’s more about seeing the texture of life and living matter, and focusing on that up close.”
The centerpiece of the exhibit is a 14-foot-long multi-panel diffraction grating, titled Interference #18 (2023). The 30 trapezoidal panes variously carry visuals of plant materials and snippets of a naked female body, the entanglement between biotic and technology taking on an abstract and sensuous turn.
Sarah Meyohas, Interference #18 (2023). Photo: Lance Brewer. © Sarah Meyohas. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen.
Meyohas’ newfound interest in anatomy is also reflected in Diffraction #1 (2023), a sculptural form part of a new series. Through the work’s joined panes, three-breasted female torsos can be seen – a surreal vision that emerges from Meyohas’ observation that “you really don’t see naked forms anymore”, either in the galleries Or Hollywood movies. “I love putting bodies in spaces where they’re not meant to be,” she added.
These new coins follow Meyohas’ other experiments with high-end technology, whether with blockchain or AI. But his were never useless pursuits of technology; instead, they are attempts to lift the veil on the true nature and ramifications of these innovations – what it might mean to financialize art (as in 2015 Bitchcoin), or algorithmize beauty (as in “cloud of petalsIt involved turning to “a different kind of engagement with technology,” she said.
Sarah Meyohas, detail of Interference #18 (2023). Photo: Lance Brewer. © Sarah Meyohas. Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen.
With her latest diffraction gratings, she sought to create “fundamentally optical pieces, requiring your physical presence,” she noted, as opposed to work that might be “absorbed” in fashionable discussions of the virtuality or generative AI.
And Meyohas’ own commitment to holographic technology runs much deeper than those finely etched surfaces. While discussing the works, she enthusiastically detailed the technique of turning every pixel in her photographs into value for the machine grids, and the dilemma of whether or not to laminate the panes. “I don’t care,” she said of the rather corny process.
“I hope people will see the difference, but I’m not quite sure they will,” she added of her high-end holograms. “They’ll be like, ‘oh, that changes colors, that’s fun,’ you know? But it’s okay if they don’t because I just had to make it happen.
“Sarah Meyohasis on view at Marianne Boesky, 509 West 24th Street, New York, through June 30.
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