You May View Nature Differently After Seeing Sarah Meyohas’s Holograms

Here, we ask an artist to frame the essential details behind one of their latest works.

Bio: Sarah Meyohas, 31, nomadic (@sarahmeyohas)

Title of work: Interference (2022). 

Where to see it: Marianne Boesky’s booth (B12) at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Three words to describe it: Impossible, mesmerizing, resonant.

What was on your mind at the time: The holograms come more out of a desire to connect viscerally with the world, rather than to express something within myself. They are analog augmented reality—nothing gets plugged in except for a spotlight from above, which illuminates the glass and replays wave phenomena to produce a three-dimensional experience. They interact with the optics of your eyes in a way that screens do not. When making these holographic works, I wanted to create an embodied experience using hyperreal macro imagery of plant matter, which reveals a sense of the infinite found within the smallest details of something so typically mundane. In a world that spins and scrolls so quickly, we can sometimes feel like we are losing control or alienated, and the act of looking very closely, of pausing on a leaf, feels immediate, meditative, and intimate.

The holograms are on glass, which is interesting because it is a medium that is invisible, ubiquitous, and very relevant to how we experience the world whether in architecture, screens, or lenses. It is a familiar material yet, once coated with a silver halide emulsion, it becomes something you have never seen before. It’s the magic of reality, since by no means is this a trick of the eye, the experience is tangible yet hard to grasp. In that way, it can feel slightly religious to witness them. 

One other point is that the use of holography is unusual. It was developed decades ago yet never achieved commercial use greater than the shiny imagery found on your credit card, and it likely never will. Just because a technology has truly no commercial use, of course, doesn’t mean it’s not mind-blowing.

An interesting feature that’s not immediately noticeable: It’s not plugged in.

One song that captures its essence: Holograms remind me of Gérard Grisey and generally Spectral music, as well as something funky and groovy like Anderson .Paak.