Jack Barrett is pleased to present, To Look is to Eat, a two-person exhibition of artists Shana Hoehn and Yan Xinyue. Spanning sculpture and painting, Yan and Hoehn draw upon the potential of material mimicry, trickery and symbolic subterfuge to ultimately transform fixed meanings.

Historically double imagery has been used as a tool of subversion-- providing a surface image to please those in power and a subtextual space for erotic imagery, dangerous political statements, and marginalized voices. Shana Hoehn utilizes these visual strategies within her practice, often taking gestures and objects coded as feminine, and re-presenting them within a new context and mischievous subversive shock. In her practice, female figures congeal within a predetermined symbology, emerging and submerging as if in a continuous costume change.

In Pike II, a girl drapes weightily from the arabesque curve of a swan’s neck. This unnatural contortion of the body, spine arched inwards like a bow, is perched on the edge of some collapse, a held breath. Wood dust, residue from the carving process is condensed back into solid form. The human form, marked by these ellipses, hovers between decay and regeneration. The word 'pike', a cheerleading jump or a long, metal-tipped anti-cavalry spear, offers varying points of entry. Hoehn deftly presents this polysemy, intertwining the passiveness of being tossed in an air-borne loss of control with the reference to weaponry, leaving us questioning the figure's intentions.

Much of Hoehn’s work emerges through careful gathering of various cross-cultural media, reading countless images of the women’s body as sites to be enacted upon and enacting various states of transformation. Hoehn allows a space for ambiguity of what it means to be in a transformative state and identifies hybridity as a possibility for latent agency. In It Feeds on Internal Fog, Hoehn references the figure-heads that ornament the bow of sailing ships, that function as emblems and extensions of various state apparatuses, have come to be seen as symbols of aestheticization of conquest, Western imperialism, and war. Hoehn’s figure however, defies its own symbolic utilization, its head not snapped forward, but slightly turned, looking as if it has taken over the steering. The deck of the ship is a congealed site of both desire and the potential for being swallowed whole, presenting as bodily orifice, parted hair, and maelstrom.

Yan Xinyue, too, delves into the realm of non-definitives. The Los Angeles-based artist, originally from Shanghai, finds inspiration in the “unreal” moments of a bustling metropolis. Her paintings capture snippets of life, viewed voyeuristically through her artistic lens. Extracting fragments of everyday existence—faces, memories, urban architectural details—her oil paintings acquire a cinematic quality, presenting figurative elements that float like ethereal vignettes within the compositions.

In Gaze (My Little Chrysanthemum Garden), silvery purple chrysanthemums unfurl as delicate petals. The piece invites a meditative disengagement, as flowers shift from bruises to stains, and then to wallpaper, only to revert to flowers once again. Staring in one spot, eyes unfocused, elements coalesce. The urban metropolis, a backdrop of real life, becomes a structural framing device through which the surreal and our present situations can be explored.

The paintings in To Look is to Eat limn the border between the absurd and the somber – underneath which reverberates a violent hum. In Stop Me If You Can #2, dragonflies emerge with stark detail against a violet-gray foamy background, their legs adorned with glittering jewelry. In Stop Me If You Can #3, Yan’s painterly technique oscillates between control and collapse. The eye roves past the gray brick background to a blood bath, as red as the bejeweled ruby earrings conveyed by the dragon-flies, that dominates the lower-left of the composition. Empty of human-figures, Yan’s dragonflies stand in for yearning, greed, desire, and implicit violence. Throughout the work, context clues and elusive elements vanish like vapor, depositing us in a generative space of ambiguity.