About
Artist Statement
I make the art I have to in order to understand a world gripped by anxieties about technology and culture. Since 2014 my primary medium has been the blockchain, where art and technology can hold each other to account and expose the hidden rules of identity, authenticity, and value that govern both.
How society's rules are made and enforced is not an abstract question for me as a trans woman. Society keeps its rulebook hidden. Smart contracts publish theirs — who can own what, what counts as real, how worth is assigned — in code anyone can read, break, or play with. I don't break them. I follow their logic so faithfully that it turns inside out: disobedience in obedience, in the code and in the culture alike.
So a smart contract nominates itself as art, and anyone can overrule it (Is Art, 2014). A collector owns an artwork whose content they will never see (Secret Artwork, 2018). A certificate guarantees, with cryptographic certainty, that a work is inauthentic (Certificate of Inauthenticity, 2020). An NFT makes the Ethereum null address, which no one can own, ownable (Titled (Information as Property as Art), 2022).
At first sight the work looks like modernist, conceptual, and postmodern art: coloured dots, stripes, grids, forms, and texts, on screens and on walls. These aesthetics are rule systems too, each with its own way of organising the world. Plumbed into the logic of smart contracts, each becomes an interface to the other. What looks like a colour field is a map of a hidden system; what reads as code is an aesthetic proposition.
The work does its thinking in public, in code anyone can inspect. You can follow that thinking as you experience it. If you want to make that leap.
Bio
Rhea Myers (b. 1973, Surrey, UK) is an artist, hacker, and writer based in British Columbia, Canada. She has used the blockchain as an artistic medium since 2014, making smart contracts, tokens, and on-chain works that examine ownership, authenticity, identity, and value by following the rules of the systems that encode them.
Myers is represented by Galerie Nagel Draxler and Gazelli Art House. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, and Arab Bank Switzerland. Her work has been exhibited at Kunsthalle Zürich, HEK Basel, Schinkel Pavillon Berlin, ArtScience Museum Singapore, Chronus Art Center Shanghai, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the Musée d'arts de Nantes. In 2026 she presented To Be Perceived, Against Evil, a two-person commission with Linda Dounia, at the Museum of the Moving Image, New York. She has had solo exhibitions with Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, in 2023 and 2025. Her Secret Artwork (Content) sold at Sotheby's in 2021 for $63,000.
Her collected projects and writings, Proof of Work: Blockchain Provocations 2011–2021, were published by Urbanomic in 2022. She studied Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and Computing in Design at the Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University.
She didn't invent NFTs, though. Twice.
CV and Press Kit
Download the CV (PDF). Bio, statement, and press images with captions and credits are on the press kit page.
Contact
[email protected]. Represented by Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin and Cologne, and Gazelli Art House, London.