Sarah Meyohas' Cloud of Petals Premiers on NOWNESS

Sarah Meyohas’s Cloud of Petals Premieres on NOWNESS

(NEW YORK — October 13, 2017) — An exclusive preview of artist Sarah Meyohas’s Cloud of Petals premieres today on NOWNESS in celebration of the artist’s new solo exhibition at Red Bull Arts New York. Watch Cloud of Petals on NOWNESS.com. The full Cloud of Petals film is now on view at Red Bull Arts New York through December 10, along with a mosaic of over 3,000 rose petals, sculptures made out of the walls salvaged from Bell Labs, and a virtual reality experience. In addition to the film, Meyohas will team up with NOWNESS (@nowness) for an Instagram takeover. The artist will dm single rose petals to Instagram users from the NOWNESS account, instigating a personalized aesthetic dialogue with the audience.

ABOUT CLOUD OF PETALS The film documents the artist’s process of gathering 16 men, all sourced from a temporary work agency, for an in-situ performative data collecting ritual at Eero Saarinen’s Bell Labs (formerly Bell Works) site for four days in Holmdel, New Jersey. "At the site of the former Bell Labs, a gigantic hangar in the rural New Jersey farmland, sixteen workers photograph 100,000 rose petals, one by one. Human hands must individually open the flower, pick the petal, place it under the lens, press the shutter, and upload the image to the cloud. The workers set aside one petal per rose that they consider most beautiful and put it in a press—preserving it as a physical artifact,” says artist Sarah Meyohas. “From this trove of images, an artificial intelligence algorithm emerges, allowing for the creation of new, unique petals forever.” Shot on 16mm film, Cloud of Petals traces beauty and subjectivity within the systems of automation and artificial intelligence. Inside the static confines of the once-modern but now-shuttered Bell Labs, the place where the world’s brightest minds came together to invent the future, Sarah Meyohas has captured a haunting vision, punctuated by arresting visuals—at one point, a live python is let loose amid the piles of petals. And above all, it tracks the transformation of these most elemental markers of color—the bloomlets of flowers—into nothing but data, ones, and zeros. The cloud of petals sprawled in the building eventually becomes a cloud of pixels.

ABOUT SARAH MEYOHAS Sarah Meyohas (b. 1991, French-American) uses networks of information, power, value, and communication. Meyohas has had solo exhibitions at Independent Régence in Brussels, Galerie Pact in Paris, and 303 in New York. Her work has been included in shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Aperture Foundation in New York, Regen Projects in Los Angeles. In 2015, she invented BitchCoin, her personal cryptocurrency. Meyohas holds a B.A. in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in finance from the Wharton School, and in 2015 received an M.F.A. from Yale University. She is based in New York and runs an eponymously named gallery, Meyohas, in Long Island City. ABOUT RED BULL ARTS NEW YORK Red Bull Arts New York is an experimental, non-commercial arts space dedicated to offering new opportunities to local and international artists by supporting bold ideas and ambitious projects. Red Bull Arts New York focuses on extending the boundaries of exhibition making; supporting the production of new work by emerging and established artists; presenting historical surveys and large-scale presentations; and exploring the intellectual and philosophical provocations of our contemporary ethos. Fundamental to the program’s philosophy, Red Bull Arts New York devotes curatorial and production support for the presentation of new work, including artist fees, robust marketing activations and a two-floor 12,000 square ft. exhibition space to help realize challenging, institutionally scaled projects. This dedication to an artist’s practice extends beyond offering critical support during the time of conceptualization and production; upon closure of the exhibition, the commissioned body of work returns to the artist(s), who retain complete rights to all works produced for their respective exhibition. ABOUT NOWNESS NOWNESS is a movement for creative excellence in storytelling, celebrating the extraordinary of every day.  Launched in 2010, NOWNESS’ unique programming strategy has established it as the go-to source of inspiration and influence across art, design, fashion, beauty, music, food, and travel. Our curatorial expertise and award-winning approach to storytelling is unparalleled. We work with exceptional talent, and both established and emerging filmmakers, who connect our audience to emotional and sensorial stories designed to provoke inspiration and debate.