Shana Hoehn

On the occasion of her first solo show with Make Room gallery, “A Tangle of Limbs and Long Hair,” Caesura editor Patrick Zapien conducted a brief interview with artist Shana Hoehn. A selection of work from the show follows below:

PZ: How do you arrive at an image? I was reading "Your Arch" — the essay from which the title of your show, A Tangle of Limbs and Long Hair, is taken — and couldn't help but think of something like André Breton's Nadja or Mad Love in the way that images — fragments of the beloved — repeat throughout the text and take on a haunting character. Rather than being gradually clarified, these images become more and more enigmatic, spreading like a haze over everything. Some of them — arched back, long hair — reappear in your drawings and sculptures, while other works in the show — the Lillies and Breast Brackets — seem to have a similar but different origin. Memory obviously plays a large role, but there also seems to be something more guiding your choices.

 SH: Collecting images is a large part of my practice in general. My newspaper, The Sirens, is a project where I started to catalog some of my image collections of gestures related to women in media and women as allegories. For the past year, or perhaps since the pandemic started, I haven’t been actively collecting but have been conjuring images related to my teenage psyche. I haven't quite untangled why this time is so important to this work, but I think it's about a moment when you are figuring out what you desire and learning about what is acceptable to want or not in your community. It was also a time when I experienced loss for the first time, so I think there were some parallels with being so shaken the past couple of years that I returned to a place and reconsidered some of the foundations I built for myself when I was a young girl.

The works in this show, including sculptures, start as “an image.” I've been obsessively drawing braids, cheerleaders, and plants in swamps and forests — all cultural touchstones for the region where I’m from, the Ark-La-Tex area, where Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana meet. Some of the works for this show stay as an image in the form of a rubbing, but others make their way into wooden sculptures. You can see this lineage in Untitled and A Tangle of Limbs and Long Hair.

Even though I haven’t kept a catalog of references yet for this show, I can easily imagine building one post-exhibition that might continue to feed this work. Sindell from Mortal Kombat, Sailor Moon, and other anime characters use their hair as weapons and even myself, as a young girl with two long braids that went past my butt.

PZ: What kind of relationship would you like viewers to have to these images? What do you want the work to make them feel or experience?

SH: I’m really interested in optical illusions, anamorphic images, childhood Halloween mazes in coloring books, and double imagery. I’ve always been fascinated with visual strategies that allow stories to unfold outside of a linear narrative-like cinema. Instead of a jump cut, your mind switches back and forth between scenes. Is it skulls or two women? Is that Jesus within the magnolia trees? For example, many of these visual tricks, like the stretched skull in The Ambassadors, have hidden meanings — symbols that relate to death, dangerous political statements, or hidden erotic imagery.  These visual tricks historically have been quite subversive, and I’ve been interested in adopting some of these strategies in my work.

As far as feelings go, I hope to create work with terror, intrigue, and tenderness. And I think these multifaceted emotional experiences come through not quite understanding what action is taking place. For the titular work, I think there is a productive confusion with pondering if this giant flaccid hanging braid is a cocoon/womb or a cut-open animal. 

PZ: How do you think about material and finish in relation to the experience you want to create for the viewer? Your sculptures have a delicate, naive quality that reminds me of medieval sculpture and religious folk art. They have a certain patina that helps to place them outside a specific moment in time.

SH: The main work in this show is finished pine, similar to early American furniture or some folk art.
Many of my metal and wood material choices in my work reference older and current objects related to the American project — ship figureheads, automobile hood ornaments, and most recently, 1950s entertainment sets and furniture.

In the Lilies in a Ditch series, I describe the material as “polychromed wood,” which directly references religious wooden works. The vulvic lily pads in the exhibition come from altering wooden serving dish sets, popular in the 1950s and commonly given as wedding gifts.