{"id":2267,"date":"2025-03-21T15:32:38","date_gmt":"2025-03-21T15:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/21\/exhibition-review-shana-hoehns-sleepless-at-make-room-los-angeles\/"},"modified":"2025-03-21T15:32:38","modified_gmt":"2025-03-21T15:32:38","slug":"exhibition-review-shana-hoehns-sleepless-at-make-room-los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/03\/21\/exhibition-review-shana-hoehns-sleepless-at-make-room-los-angeles\/","title":{"rendered":"Exhibition Review: Shana Hoehn\u2019s \u201cSleepless\u201d at Make Room Los Angeles"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In \u201cSleepless\u201d at Make Room Los Angeles, the subconscious takes sculptural form\u2014uneasy, uncanny and hauntingly familiar. Courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles \/ Photo: Alex Delapena<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There\u2019s something sinister and uncanny yet quietly revelatory in the isolated body fragments sculpted and painted by Los Angeles-based artist Shana Hoehn<\/a>. The works in her latest show, \u201cSleepless,\u201d at Make Room Los Angeles, drift through nocturnal dimensions, emerging with symbolic force as if from a dream\u2014or from the abyss of a more collective subconscious. Derived from fallen trees in Pasadena, the show\u2019s wall-based sculptures take shape as embodiments of both physical and psychological trauma. At once haunting and hybrid, they already suggest a fluid coexistence between human bodies and plant life. Indeed, the entire exhibition pulses with this tension\u2014between embodiment and disembodiment, inner and outer worlds, the shell and the animated current of psychic energy within. Hoehn\u2019s sculptures seem summoned by archetypal forces breaking into consciousness, manifesting with intensity and disruption as both ominous presences and secretions of repressed feelings and compulsions that have slipped past control.<\/p>\n

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Hoehn\u2019s accompanying paintings channel the same symbolic language, as the canvas provides a liminal space between intuition and premeditation\u2014an arena where expression comes more immediately. \u201cThey function like icons or symbols rather than a full body,\u201d the artist says as we walk through the show. These new works are composed of collaged canvas fragments and rubbings taken from Pasadena trees that fell during the last windstorm. \u201cI like that the local landscape is imprinted in the cultural objects.\u201d Completed over the past several months, the paintings have evolved into a poignant, sensitive testament to the ecological tragedy caused by the recent wildfires in Los Angeles<\/a>. Though the trees are now gone, their ghostly presence lingers in Hoehn\u2019s paintings.<\/p>\n

All of the works in the show were made during a particularly difficult period for Hoehn, who endured months of sleeplessness while navigating profound loss and grief. The painfully contorted figures she sculpts seem to give shape to this psychological turmoil, acting as vessels for the remnants of unresolved trauma. Many of the sculptural presences reflect an intimate and often feminine bond between body and nature, invoking a visual imagination rooted in a girlhood psyche.<\/p>\n

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Shana Hoehn. Courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles \/ Photo: Alex Delapena<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Carved wood braids twist into hunting tentacles, disembodied forms that menace as if poised to strangle external presences. At the same time, they conjure the image of tree branches steaming and pushing outward as they grow. Disjointed from any torso, cheerleaders\u2019 legs hang acrobatically from the wall, frozen mid-jump. These sculptures function as vessels\u2014conduits for memory\u2014through which past experiences are reconfigured into hybrid symbolic imagery. In this transformation, they move beyond the personal to signal a more universal relationship between the human body and its environment. \u201cThere\u2019s a place that I think most people go back to in their memories, a certain age,\u201d Hoehn tells us. \u201cFor me, that\u2019s between 12 and 15 years old, when the forest meant freedom, escape and a place for hiding.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her upbringing in East Texas surfaces throughout her work and visual vocabulary. The swampy, amphibious terrain, the heavy humid air, the cyclical rhythms of life, death and regeneration all permeate her sculptural and painterly language. \u201cI\u2019ve always been interested in working with the landscape in which I come from, this wooden, swampy area, but I\u2019ve brought a lot more in the landscape I currently live in.\u201d The paintings\u2014dense with the same mystery, fear and subtle allegorical charge\u2014were painted from life during daylight and then altered by the artist into darker, more ambiguous atmospheres. Each work exists in that undefinable, liminal space between sunrise and sunset, between light and shadow, between life and death.<\/p>\n

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Shana Hoehn, Untitled<\/em>, 2024-2025; graphite and oil on canvas, 58 x 46.5 in. Courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles \/ Photo: Alex Delapena<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

She shares that she has long studied the crucifix as a symbol, repurposing its form and meaning throughout her work. Hoehn grew up deeply religious, which explains the faintly Catholic eschatological currents and symbologies that surface in her practice\u2014wrestling with the tension between pain and redemption, bodily punishment and violence and the allure of ascetic elevation. The fragmented body, as rendered by Hoehn, already gestures toward the relics of saints and the iconography of martyrdom.<\/p>\n

Many of Hoehn\u2019s sculptures appear poised for transformation, their forms suggesting an imminent shift. Yet there is also an unmistakable sense of restraint, as if something within the work resists or represses this evolution, holding the figures in stasis. A latent violence pulses through the pieces as if the artist\u2019s process itself were a cathartic exorcism of unspoken trauma. Masochistically stretched and contorted, her fragmented limbs, spines and breasts bend into emergent architectural structures\u2014quietly confronting the vulnerability and hypersensitivity of flesh and the peril of a not fully conscious, or even coerced, experience of embodiment.<\/p>\n

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Shana Hoehn, I give birth to myself<\/em>, 2025; oil on canvas, 40 x 48 in. Courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles \/ Photo: Alex Delapena<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Across works, shells and cocoons emerge as symbols of shelter\u2014at once protective and repressive, containing within them both the potential and the constraint of further transformation. In multiple sculptures, holes recur as ambiguous motifs: chasms and traps, but also nests and hiding places. \u201cThere are both ominous holes, which are swallowing things. But then, a lot of these holes also became these places for birth and rebirth,\u201d Shana says, gesturing toward I Give Birth to Myself<\/i> (2025), a moody painting in which a figure with long, flowing hair and a bare back hunches in sorrow or introspection, either emerging from a tree or collapsing into its embrace. In another work, Untitled<\/i> (2024\u20132025), two female bodies hang in uneasy postures in front of the gaping maw of a tree. \u201cThere\u2019s this bad vortex, where someone is sucked in, but it\u2019s also an intimate place,\u201d the artist adds. As shadow gorges, these openings function like portals for invisible forces.<\/p>\n

Enigmatic symbolic fragments are carefully scattered across the gallery in a calibrated choreography of dual forces, as Hoehn confronts themes of mortality, impermanence and the possibility of regeneration. \u201cThe braids and the trees almost have a similar relationship in this work, as well as the cocoons\u2014they all convey this idea of suffocation and restriction, or something that can allow transformation,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Circulating through a constant exchange of disembodiment, embodiment and transformation, the physical and psychological experiences in Hoehn\u2019s work appear already estranged from the fugitive, existential essence of the body. Decaying organic matter, the skeletal remnants of dead trees, the tension in a strained pose\u2014all convey the precarity of being while simultaneously contemplating the regenerative systems embedded in nature\u2019s resilience.<\/p>\n

Shana Hoehn\u2019s \u201cSleepless<\/a>\u201d is on view at Make Room, Los Angeles, through April 5, 2025.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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In \u201cSleepless,\u201d contorted objects render you dizzy, porous and ready to be absorbed. Courtesy the artist and Make Room, Los Angeles \/ Photo: Alex Delapena<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Shana<\/p><\/div>\n