Shana Hoehn

Through both sculpture and drawing, Shana Hoehn interrogates embodiment, transformation, and the mutable nature of agency. Using a mix of traditional and digital fabrication, she incorporates wood, clay, sawdust, bronze, and aluminum to create hybrid forms that feel at once fragile, visceral, and uncanny. Rooted in her upbringing in East Texas, Hoehn draws on the region’s swamps, creeks, and haunted forests—places where decay, folklore, and invention intertwine. These landscapes intersect with motifs from her girlhood imagination: birds and lotus flowers, ribbons and braids, cheerleader skirts and hollow trees. Such imagery speaks to cultural rituals of performance and violence, where women appear as symbols or mascots, bound within cycles of spectacle and desire. Her sculptures explore the long history of women’s bodies as sites of distortion and metamorphosis. Limbs splinter into architecture, braids devour themselves, and trees seem to give birth. The works oscillate between erotic playfulness and unsettling violence—evoking peep shows, knots, ornaments, and dismembered fragments. Figures appear suspended in moments of contortion, collapse, or hatching, as if caught in perpetual transformation. Animated by unseen forces, Hoehn’s bodies refuse containment, asserting agency through their own uncanny mutations. ...