Shana Hoehn: Sleepless

For her second solo exhibition at the gallery, Los Angeles-based artist Shana Hoehn presents a new body of wall-based sculpture derived from fallen trees along with figurative oil paintings made of collaged canvas fragments and rubbings of tree bark.

In Sleepless, night opens itself for free fall. Contorted objects render you dizzy, porous, and ready to be absorbed. Holes echo throughout an aching landscape, while vessels or symbols for rest or grieving suggest uncertainty may be safer than the present. Large anamorphic tree hollows act as ominous basins to softly sink into or to be consumed by. Carved wooden braids gently ripple and repeat between tentacular protrusions as curious armor emerges from tree branches. The gleeful, girlish legs of cheerleaders peek out from severed branches. Disembodied wooden legs –menacingly making petrified mid-jump splits– are pressed against the periphery of the room, referent of a gargoyle or religious icon. 

The wood for the rubbings and sculptures in this new body of work was collected from local fallen trees taken during a windstorm in the spring. It’s hard to disconnect Hoehn’s work from its timely psychic pull, or the media-laden timespace studded with reflexive and expansive mythology that is Los Angeles. Los Angeles, a city ready to propagate the myth of perfection around the body, or the way one lives a life, as its psychic drama slings at you from every angle within its prescribed dream state. Hoehn’s work is distilled as quiet wreckage from within it. Wreckage as the accumulation of shards of symbolic and personal history, melded to forge logic between disorientation and the facts of a life. Details and memory are carved and transformed as an offering.    

Iterations of seeds, birth, and growth visually document the nonlinear metamorphosis that Hoehn explores. Movement and stillness take turns to connect various truths. A body drapes over a hollowed-out wooden vessel with carved roots, inverted and serene, while the artist’s back emerges from a braid cocoon in another work entitled “I give birth to myself.”

Hoehn grew up in a conservative forested and swampy East Texan city. Her molding of meaning and violent and macabre legacies carefully pull from nature, football culture, local lore of her hometown, literature, psychoanalysis, and lived experience. Using her own experiences to animate her work, her personal biography, and her roots in a state with strict abortion laws, become palpable. Through this lens, birth, as well as transformation, become complicated, terrifying, and joyful. By using her own fears and desires as material, Hoehn’s work gives you an invitation to delve into your own. The growth and permutations of meaning made physical in her work become analogous for the way fear and desire infest and adorn our inner lives. 

— Text by Zoe Koke