US: Performance artist Sarah Meyohas turns jittery stock market into exhibit at Manhattan Gallery

When stock market downward graphs get tough to take, the tough turn them into performance art. Or so thinks 24-year-old artist Sarah Meyohas. She launched an exhibit called Stock Performance in New York City at the same time some $7tn (£4.9tn) worth of value was being wiped out in global markets at the start of 2016.

Meyohas, who considers herself the "most irrational person on the market," charted her own stock market trades over ten days in real time. "It's not for profit," she explained to the Atlantic. "It's purely visual," she added.

She invested her own money, purchasing stocks from the 303 Gallery in Manhattan, then drew the changing values of her stock holdings in a line with an oil stick. The result was a painting for each trade and her changing fortunes "The line, value over time, is an index of her movement, physically in the gallery and virtually in her ownership," artistically noted Bloomberg, one of a number of financial media outlets that paid attention.

Meyohas sometimes bought a particular stock not to make money but in the hopes of getting the right downward, upward or flat line to make an interesting picture.

Meyohas said she attempted to bring together "philosophy, art, understanding what it is to be human and existing, and finance – which sometimes feel devoid from that, but ultimately it's just made up of humans."

Her last foray in the art and finance world was a project she coined Bitchcoin, a cryptocurrency that could be used for the sole purpose of investing in her art.