Shana Hoehn

Working in sculpture and drawing, Los Angeles-based artist Shana Hoehn considers modes and conditions of agency, embodiment, and transformation. Hoehn's sculptural work combines traditional and digital fabrication techniques and employs various materials, including wood, sawdust, clay, bronze, and aluminum. Landscapes familiar to Hoehn's upbringing in East Texas inform her interest in cycles of life and death, evident in the humid swamplands where decaying is rapid, boggy creeks with local bigfoot-like monsters and haunted forests of the region. A distinct set of visual motifs trace the artist's girlhood psyche such as sylphlike birds, lotus flowers and cattails, babies nested in the hollow of a tree, a cheerleader's skirt, a nest of disembodied braids, and baroque ribbons and bows. Regalia associated with football and military culture evoke pageantries of war in which women are subservient mascots and cheerleaders of violence—nude car hood ornaments and naval figureheads—raising questions of power and desire. Hoehn's work references a long and winding history of women contorting and the bodily destruction involved with transformation. Fragmented limbs, spines, and breasts morph into decorative architectural forms; braids swallow and are split open; trees give birth. Bodies become landscapes, and landscapes become bodies. Tension is garnered in the sculpture's kinky subtly, alluding to peep shows, butt plugs, knots and ropes, splayed limbs, and luring self-penetrating holes—work attuned to the sensitive and stimulated body, aware of the vulnerable excitability of flesh. Emotional and violent psycho-physical states—hysteria, rage, possession—are imagined as monstrous amalgamated bodies, as creatures caught in moments of transformation that presume various dynamics of agency. These sculptural contortionists appear to levitate, fold, collapse, hatch, split, and splinter like eternally petrified shapeshifters. Animated by unseen forces, Hoehn's figures twist and bend in acts of refusal and self-transformation. Hoehn received her MFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University in Sculpture and Extended Media and earned a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at Jack Barrett Gallery, New York City, NY (2023); Deli Gallery, Mexico City, MX (2023), Prairie, Chicago, IL (2023); Make Room, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Art Pace, San Antonio, TX (2022); Euqinom Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2021), among others. Recent group exhibitions have been held at Union Pacific, Murmurs, Nicodim, Ghebaly Gallery, Simon Lee Gallery, the Blaffer Museum, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, and Lodos Gallery. Hoehn has participated in various international residencies, including a Fulbright Fellowship in Mexico, Artpace International Artist in Residence in San Antonio, the Jan Van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and SOMA Summer in Mexico City. Hoehn's work has received notable coverage in publications including Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Mousse Magazine, among others.