Expo: Sarah Meyohas questions the reproduction of beauty

In a video piece, the young French-American artist Sarah Meyohas tackles mental images and nature’s creations, and asks if beauty can be reproduced infinitely.

Roses photographed, petal by petal. A ballet of men, black trousers, white shirts, with their monochrome vases of roses, a fly moving around on a screen, floral confetti on the geometric floor-tiles of a great hall, a yellow python climbing a stream of electric cables. A conceptual daydream of great formal coherence, Cloud of Petals is the central piece of Sarah Meyohas’s first exhibition in Brussels.

In this 30-minute video, the French-American artist, who has not yet turned thirty, presents a digital conceit which questions the permanence of images in the era of the pixel. In August 2016, Meyohas had the petals of 10,000 roses photographed in order to compile a digital library which would enable her to generate an infinite number of new pixelised images of petals.

Infinite artificial network
The images were shot in the former laboratories of Bell System, one of the last buildings designed by Eero Saarinen. It was here that the transistor, the laser, and binary code were first developed, though today the immense complex with its mirrored exteriors is empty and neglected. There is a contrast between the impermanence, frailty even, of human constructions, the fleeting beauty of nature’s creations, like a rose petal, and the apparent immortality of the digital.

Thousands of images of petals pulse, bit by bit, through the cables and on the monitors of the servers, and are reassembled into an infinite artificial network. But they will never replace the sensuality and fragility of a rose petal. We can never find an image of a petal archived in the human brain. It is far more ambiguous to observe something in its absence than to observe it in person. “While computers, even when switched off, can retain an identical image of a petal forever, the human brain can only retain our spirit while we are alive,” she writes.

On the second floor of the gallery, around the glass ceiling, she exhibits the photos of petals. Like isolated patches of colour, they appear to float within their frames. In the first room, you can view an installation connected to the art/stock-trading series which made Sarah Meyohas known with a performance in the 303 Gallery in New York.

> Sarah Meyohas: Cloud of Petals. > 17/6, Independent Régence, Brussels