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In her first Manhattan solo exhibition, Sarah Meyohas inventively recycles the genre of the artist performing live in a gallery. Wearing her own elegant design of a businesswoman’s suit, with gold pinstripes on sheer gray fabric, Ms. Meyohas sits at a chic, all-glass desk in the middle of 303 Gallery. Hanging on the gallery walls around her are 10 blank white canvases.
Ms. Meyohas, who studied finance at Wharton and recently received an M.F.A. from Yale, is known for creating a cryptocurrency called BitchCoin. Here, she cheerfully explains to visitors that she is using her laptop to buy and sell stocks on the New York Stock Exchange. Every day she selects a company for which little or no trading is happening, and with her own money she buys stock in that company, which drives up its price. This precipitates a sell-off, at which point she may or may not buy more stocks. After cashing out, she takes a black marker and draws a line on one of the canvases, loosely tracing the stock’s price line during the time she invested in it. By the end of her two-week performance, each canvas will bear such a record for a different stock: A representation of an abstraction that symbolizes an infinitesimal piece of the universal financial flux. (Ms. Meyohas said she hoped to break even on her investments.)
That Ms. Meyohas’s process is ridiculous is of the essence. It’s a parody of the hyper-professionalized avant-gardist operating in a world ruled by incomprehensible, transcendental forces. It’s worth noting, however, that her canvases are tangible commodities selling for $10,000 apiece. Ms. Meyohas doesn’t address the basis for that valuation, but considering her double-barreled aesthetic and financial acumen, it would be interesting if she did.
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