Installation view
Anastasia Douka
Shana Hoehn
It would go
Curated by Rodrigo Valenzuela
November 18 - December 23, 2017
Part 1: Saturday November 18th, 6-8pm
Part 2 with a walkthrough by curator Rodrigo Valenzuela: Saturday December 2nd, 4-6pm
Klowden Mann is proud to present Anastasia Douka and Shana Hoehn for the first time in Los Angeles. It would go presents works recently created by Houston-based artist Shana Hoehn during her residency at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Athens-based artist Anastasia Douka for her solo exhibition at Werft 5, Cologne, Germany. Curated by Rodrigo Valenzuela, the exhibition will be on view from November 18 through December 23rd, 2017, with an opening reception on November 18th from 6-8pm.
From re-casting monuments to updated fresco techniques, both artist address different anxieties around subject-object relationship, and how and what kind knowledge we draw from classical sources. Hoehn and Douka offer a playful and considered shift in perspective on the historical and physical connotation of their objects, opening a different set of possibilities to understand their subject matter.
Anastasia Douka mainly works on installations that reflect on archetypes, socioeconomic expectations and modern or historical identities. Douka’s work is a continuous research on paradigms of precious and everyday objects, geography and human anatomy. She presents a set of: two oversized bleach drawings/ diagrams on fabric, as well as two different casts commenting on dislocation and appropriation. Specifically, about the paper cast The wife (Oz) 2017, Douka says, “It is common that represented female figures in public sculpture are outnumbered by male ones. I have made a selection out of the many public sculptures of the city of Athens—this is one of them: Aspasia, the wife of Pericles, known to us strictly as the wife of the statesman who came to fame during the Golden Age, a time of growth and prosperity for the athenian hegemony.”
Shana Hoehn presents a series of photographic sculptures sourced from her own video footage called The Boneyard. She writes, “I rewind to a corporeal experience of narrative in frescoes, one in which the viewer animates fluid imagery with their own body. In this series, sourced video footage breaks its once destined linearity. Still frames are removed from their original order and branch into polymino forms where possibilities arise for reconfiguration. Aerial views of movie sets become conveyer belt-like configurations suggestive of editing timelines. But this thin slice of time has thickened; pixels amass and morph into stone.“
Anastasia Douka's (b. Athens, Greece) recent shows and projects include: Animalier with no taste for the Sublime (solo) at Werft 5, Kunsthaus Rhenania, Cologne, 2017. DESTE Prize Anniversary Exhibition at Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, 2017, Les Mains sans sommeil, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2017 Doubt at Percy Street, London. Douka has been awarded the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship (Chicago, 2013), the SAIC Skowhegan Fellowship (2013) and the DESTE Foundation Prize (Athens, 2011). She has held residencies with Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès at John Lobb&CO, Yaddo Colony, NY, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME and Salzburg International Summer Academy. Douka is a graduate of the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received the New Artist Society Trustees Merit Scholarship. She also holds a Master’s Degree on Digital and New Media and a BFA in Sculpture from the Athens School of Fine Arts.
Shana Hoehn (b. Texarkana, TX) is a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and a Fulbright Research Fellowship alumna. Hoehn holds a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in painting and an MFA form Virginia Commonwealth University in sculpture and extended media. She has participated in residencies such as Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Acre, and Soma Summer. Shana Hoehn has upcoming exhibitions Visual Arts Center, University of Texas, Austin, TX (2018), Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA (2017), Valet, Richmond, VA (2018) and Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX (2018). Hoehn has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Houston.