Called Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams, Sarah Meyohas’ new installation is on view in the Coachella Valley for the 5th edition of the Desert X festival.
From March 8 to May 11, the Desert X event invite another selection of artists to fill the Coachella Valley with a range of monumental and experimental pieces. The goal is to create a “striking constellation of work”, as Executive Director of Desert X Jenny Gil explains in Art News Paper. Eleven digital and non-digital artists are involved in this year’s event. They include the Franco-American artist Sarah Meyohas, who is showing Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams, an immersive installation (the visual details of which are still being kept secret) featuring luminous patterns and “caustics” created by refracting light through various curved surfaces.
Mirage, mirage…
Openly inspired by ancient time-measurement technologies, Sarah Meyohas’s work also relies on an innovative technique for shaping light which includes the viewer. There is a playful aspect to how the sunlight starts being projected onto a ribbon-like structure which cascades over the desert floor. In doing so, each intervention leads to a unique mirage. The process is reminiscent of Speculation, an earlier series by the artist which used mirrors and reflections to create a loop as infinite as it was unreal.
The mirage emerges from a desire for water and hot vapors, echoing the situation in California, which was so recently ravaged by terrible fires. Neville Wakefield, the artistic director of the 5th edition of Desert X, says he selected the work of Sarah Meyohas and other artists to highlight the “urgent need to devise new, sustainable approaches to living in an increasingly threatened world”. A case of art imitating reality.
Nature and technology
Truth Arrives in Slanted Beams is another example of Sarah Meyohas’s unique approach to using technology to transpose issues related to the natural world into works developed with digital tools. In her work, AI, digitization and augmented reality interact with the poetry of the landscape and its various elements. In her Cloud of Petals (on display at the Centre Pompidou), she digitized 100,000 rose petals and installed them in the former Bell Laboratories, an iconic site in the history of computing.
