There’s something sinister and uncanny yet quietly revelatory in the isolated body fragments sculpted and painted by Los Angeles-based artist Shana Hoehn. The works in her latest show, “Sleepless,” at Make Room Los Angeles, drift through nocturnal dimensions, emerging with symbolic force as if from a dream—or from the abyss of a more collective subconscious. Derived from fallen trees in Pasadena, the show’s 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—between embodiment and disembodiment, inner and outer worlds, the shell and the animated current of psychic energy within. Hoehn’s 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.
Shana Hoehn Explores the Uncanny Dichotomy Between Suffocation and Shelter in L.A.
A latent violence pulses through the works in “Sleepless” at Make Room Los Angeles, implying the artist’s process is a cathartic exorcism of unspoken trauma.
21 March 2025
