Marianne Boesky Gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of New York-based conceptual artist Sarah Meyohas (b. 1991, New York, NY). Experimenting with artificial intelligence and complex uses of holographic and photographic technology, Meyohas expands upon her long-standing engagement with optics and perception and reveals a new fascination with anatomy—from the female form to the human eye.

Throughout her practice, Meyohas considers the production of value, the nature of exchange, and the romantic resonance of the sublime while seeking 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.

Meyohas debuts two new series—the Méduses and the Diffractions—alongside new works from her ongoing Interferences series in this exhibition. Enigmatic and mesmerizing, the sculptural Méduses use Midjourney—a generative AI program—to marry the form of a jellyfish with that of a human eye. Meyohas places the generated images of jellyfish eyes within a glass dome, illuminates the images from within, and finishes the work with a custom lens, to produce a glowing, ethereal effect. Visually intriguing, the Méduses engage with the intricacies of technology, symbolism, and myth. Meyohas sees a metaphorical link between the nervous system of jellyfish and artificial intelligence, both ancient and decentralized. The French word méduse, which literally translates as “jellyfish,” also references the myth of Medusa—the ancient Greek monster whose gaze held the power to petrify. The semantic leaps Meyohas makes in these works echo the ways in which artificial intelligence systems produce their own surrealism. Drawing on the concept of the “evil eye,” Meyohas here meditates on the power of both the gaze and the image, harnessing Medusa’s gaze and Athena’s shield to evoke a sense of both wonder and trepidation. Technologically sophisticated and visually compelling, the Méduses are nonetheless grounded in sensory experience, utilizing the natural world to underscore an embodied experience of the artwork.

Building on her ongoing experimentation with glass, technology, and the intersections therein, Meyohas also debuts a work from her new Diffractions series, a suspended sculptural form comprising multiple glass panel diffraction gratings. Created by etching an image into glass at a rate of three thousand lines per millimeter—these opalescent objects create a kaleidoscopic array of colors when viewed from different angles. Much like holograms, diffraction gratings generate precise structural color—color produced by the interference of light waves with the microscopic structures etched into the glass. The snaking, sculptural form, combining overlapped and repeated images of the female form, evokes the organic nature of the body represented within. Eliciting a sense of movement and transformation reminiscent of early experimentation with movement in photography, Diffraction #1 reflects the continued influence of technological innovation on contemporary artistic expression—an ever-present theme in Meyohas’s work.

Alongside her novel experiments with AI and diffraction gratings, the exhibition features new works from Meyohas’s ongoing Interferences series, including a monumental, multipanel hologram. Here, Meyohas layers the magnified imagery of plant matter of the early Interferences with images of the nude female form, laying bare the connections between plant matter and bodies as coexisting living organisms. At fourteen feet wide and comprising more than thirty trapezoidal panels, the new hologram, Interference #18, is perhaps her most explicit engagement yet with the complex dynamics of human life in an increasingly technological society. Fractured and flickering, this abstracted, sensorial experience of the body serves as a reminder that the natural world is its own form of technology.

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.