Shana Hoehn

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

Shana Hoehn (b. Texarkana, TX, 1991) makes sculpture, drawing, and painting concerned with what happens when modes of collective control and performance give way, and the inevitable collapse, decay, and regrowth that follows. Her imagery draws from both cultural mythology and the mythos of her own girlhood, from Southeastern forests and swamplands, football and military culture, to levitating women and disembodied braids. Hoehn works with salvaged wood, sawdust, clay, cast metal, and found objects alongside two-dimensional work made from paint and rubbings taken from both bark and her own carved woodblocks. These thematic and material explorations trace back to Hoehn's upbringing, steeped in East Texas pageantry on one side and military culture on the other. After Hoehn’s Japanese grandmother married a US soldier, she named her sons George and Albert, after Washington and Einstein respectively, and chose not to teach them her native language in hopes of better assimilating them into the dominant narrative of American life, an inheritance Hoehn returns to throughout her work. Hoehn describes her family as having been steadfast and adamant in their desire to lead an almost hyperbolic version of American life. In this vein, cheerleading is one of the many iconographic and symbolic interests that surfaced from this atmosphere. A cheerleader and dancer in her adolescence, it has become a central motif in Hoehn’s practice, an icon of American purity she continuously unravels....

Artwork