Daniel Gerwin reviews It would go on Artforum 12.12.17

Anastasia Douka and Shana Hoehn
Klowden Mann
6023 Washington Blvd
November 18–December 23

In Anastasia Douka and Shana Hoehn’s current two-person show, the past is pulled into the present while the present is pushed into antiquity. In The wife (Oz) 2017 (modified paper cast of “Aspasia” by Mara Karetsou, 1983), 2017, Douka recasts Karetsou’s bust of Pericles’s mistress from a public sculpture in Athens, adorning the figure’s head with a funnel. The work’s understatement pays homage to women who, despite their accomplishments, are known primarily for their associations with powerful men. Nearby, on a pedestal no more than two inches high, is Douka’s How to Hide, 2016, a collection of gesticulating plaster hands suggesting benedictions and rude gestures, both understandable responses to history with its countless forgotten women.

Hoehn’s series “The Boneyard,” 2017, at first appears to be made up of broken slabs of ancient fresco in wandering linear arrangements, held about a foot off the wall by mounting brackets. They are, in fact, stills from her eponymous video transferred onto wet Hydrostone, into which she has embedded dominoes, a tape dispenser, a peppermint, and a broken plate. Two of the three wall configurations are laid out like a game of dominoes while also evoking sections of a labyrinth. The imagery involves aerial views of people in drab administrative or medical settings, as well as references to Eadweard Muybridge’s protocinematic experiments, all bordered above and below by horizontal black bands reminiscent of the edges of filmstrips. Hoehn slows down time and materializes the process of film editing, in which all moments are interchangeable. The quotidian feels honored and preserved, as when the universe is visible in a single blade of grass.

Click here to view original article