Around this time last year, the art press picked up a quirky new story: a Yale photography M.F.A. named Sarah Meyohas had created her own cryptocurrency called Bitchcoin, with an exchange rate set at one Bitchcoin to 25 square inches of a Meyohas print. (As the value of her work changes over time, so too will the value of the coins.) In an art world that was grappling, often dismissively, with the shift toward art-as-investment, Meyohas’s take on the Bitcoin addressed the world of finance with unusual directness and a cooperative stance. It seemed to offer collectors a tool for using Meyohas's artworks as investments.
Her new show “Stock Performances” at 303 Gallery (running January 8th through the 30th) reverses the dynamic, using investments to generate artworks. For the next several weeks the gallery will become a stock exchange-cum-studio as Meyohas trades with an eye for aesthetics rather than profit, recording her results along the way with oil stick on canvas. At the same time, she’ll be creating a series of artists' books with a different kind of commodity, gold (the books feature paints made with gold nanoparticles, developed in conjunction with Dr. Erik Dreaden of MIT). And to top it off, the 24-year-old is also opening a new exhibition of works by Suzeanne McClelland and Brock Enright on January 22nd in her Upper East Side apartment gallery, Meyohas.
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