Make Room presents a dual-artist booth of Korean painter Guimi You and Los Angeles-based sculptor Shana Hoehn. Working in a mode inspired by the art historical legacy of Symbolism and Surrealism, both Hoehn and You are concerned with the psychic power of images and the hidden realm of meaning—made up of countless unconscious associations —that lies on the very surface of “mere” appearance.
Guimi You’s saturated landscapes are populated less by a depiction of nature than by a series of mental impressions whose constellation structures the compositions of her paintings, endowing them with a logic that departs from reality—a shape and movement all of their own. The result is a kind of mental landscape where every object exerts a talismanic pull on the viewer, as if they each contained the secret to the cosmic order.
Having studied traditional altar-making practices in rural Mexico, Shana Hoehn’s work possesses a similar religiosity. Her fixation on certain image motifs—arched backs, braids of hair, and bodily orifices—combined with the rough, almost patinated finish of her sculptures creates a feeling of extreme compression that pervades the work and calls to mind the naive simplicity of medieval Christian sculpture and religious folk art. By pairing these two artists together, we hope to contribute to a larger conversation about the role of memory, the power of images, and the open-ended nature of aesthetic experience that has started to come to the forefront in recent years.
