Shana Hoehn and Milagros Rojas
Shudders and Perforations
December 16, 2023 - February 3, 2024
Branches, leaves, knots, cylinders and movement. Milagros Rojas presents a series of drawings that explore a deformed geometry, combining abstraction and figuration to create forms that glide over the paper. Fragments and layers are defined by graphite, or at times by white space. This series announces an intangible environment capable of absorbing the gaze through the detail and the constant line. In this way, Rojas constructs circular and tubular figures and pieces of fabric that acquire a certain volume and brightness. In all of these works there is a game of perspective, either the insistent clash of a line that divides the composition and suggests different blocks in the drawing, or because we are presented with a detail of a scene that seems wider. The triptych on display takes this exploration to the limit in combination with a landscape format that fragments and divides the scene. Here, the horizon organizes our field of vision in a different form, and the perspective shift invokes a fall.
Gestures, extracts, cavities, protuberances, hybridizations. Shana Hoehn exhibits a group of sculptures characterized by multiple meanings, a doubling image. Bodily shapes that simultaneously work as fragments of a body or an unsuspected landscape, references that go over the curves of the dermis to a great anus. These volumes present an action that culminated in a disoriented episode, either by weirding or shivering. The choice of materials, wood, bronze or sawdust completes this purpose. Hoehn plays with temporality, the finishes on each object refer to the passing of time -to a certain decomposition-, while their combination announces the conclusion of an event: germination, penetration, attack, rest.
The dialogue that these two bodies of work confirm the construction of landscapes where mystery and the abject dominate. Both Rojas and Hoehn point to an opening towards scenarios where the recognizable is mixed with the unrecognizable, the obvious with the undefined, the earthly with the fantastic. Both works are based on constant materiality, whether it is the graphite in the drawing or the salvaged wood in the sculptures. With these resources, they build transitory scenarios, going from apparent calm to implicit violence. This transit in each artist leads to a spiritual sense. In the case of Rojas, there is a symbolic trait that proposes the luminous as a way of thinking in an alternate plane. For Hoehn, the object itself is a relic that opens holes and caves and insinuates a passage to another dimension.
Gestures, extracts, cavities, protuberances, hybridizations. Shana Hoehn exhibits a group of sculptures characterized by multiple meanings, a doubling image. Bodily shapes that simultaneously work as fragments of a body or an unsuspected landscape, references that go over the curves of the dermis to a great anus. These volumes present an action that culminated in a disoriented episode, either by weirding or shivering. The choice of materials, wood, bronze or sawdust completes this purpose. Hoehn plays with temporality, the finishes on each object refer to the passing of time -to a certain decomposition-, while their combination announces the conclusion of an event: germination, penetration, attack, rest.
The dialogue that these two bodies of work confirm the construction of landscapes where mystery and the abject dominate. Both Rojas and Hoehn point to an opening towards scenarios where the recognizable is mixed with the unrecognizable, the obvious with the undefined, the earthly with the fantastic. Both works are based on constant materiality, whether it is the graphite in the drawing or the salvaged wood in the sculptures. With these resources, they build transitory scenarios, going from apparent calm to implicit violence. This transit in each artist leads to a spiritual sense. In the case of Rojas, there is a symbolic trait that proposes the luminous as a way of thinking in an alternate plane. For Hoehn, the object itself is a relic that opens holes and caves and insinuates a passage to another dimension.