Bio

Sam Shawzin (b. 1993, Los Angeles). Based in New York, Shawzin’s work explores the narrative of sex and death, through a neurodivergent, distorted lens. Her fear of mortality and desire for control are embodied in a hypersexual loop — the spiral of the snail shell, the contours of gender ambiguous flesh. Through its seductive materiality, the work stages an encounter where pleasure is shadowed by unease, collapsing boundaries between longing and aversion.

The snail shell serves as a metaphor for ego: the heavy, spiraling burden we each carry.  Shawzin’s work delves into the horror and glory of the distorted ego mirror, the narcissistic attempt at self reflection. Each delicately rendered form is locked in place, condemned to eternally examine its existential plight, recalling Caravaggio’s Narcissus. Through silicone, dead spiral shells, and hyperreal flesh, Shawzin transforms mental illness, obsession, and hypersexuality into tactile, visceral experiences.

The work is informed by the stories of Lilith and Eve, reflecting the cultural narratives that reward obedience and punish rebellion in women. Shawzin’s sculptures inhabit the space between compliance and provocation, examining how female bodies are policed, glorified, and condemned—echoing the historical tension between societal expectation and personal autonomy.

Her practice is an act of defiance—a survivalist response from the edges of a queer perspective, where beauty, decay, and desire coil endlessly into one another. The shells’ exoskeletons function as memento mori, reminding us that even acts of rebellion and vanity are ultimately undone by death.

In the tension between control and flesh, Shawzin’s sculptures become sites of resistance, where subversion presses against societal frameworks and the body negotiates the boundaries of autonomy, beauty, and desire.