Featured Store Artist Profile: Shannon Bodrogi (Psiclops Press)

The Store has new artwork on display by Shannon Bodrogi, a Seattle-based artist and musician. We reached out to Shannon to learn more about their practice, inspiration, and plans.

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By Rachael Lang

Tell us about your background. Your hometown is Santa Maria, CA, and you majored in printmaking at San Francisco State University. What inspired you to become an artist and pursue printmaking academically? 

I’ve always been creative. It’s the way I process and make sense of the world, and from early on I knew I wanted to be an artist. I arrived at printmaking sort of by accident, but it makes sense that I got there with the interests I had as a young person. I’ve always drawn, but in high school my medium was filmmaking. I had an amazing film teacher (shout out to Mr. Garcia), who challenged and inspired me and suggested I go to SFSU because it had a good film program. In sort of a split-second decision moment, I landed on Fine Art as a major instead of Film. I took a printmaking class in my freshman year, and I was hooked. It was fun, process-oriented, and I loved the community of the studio. I had great teachers in the printmaking program (shout outs to Susan Belau and Mario Laplante), who encouraged me and taught me all the various forms of printmaking. I really connected with the process of paper lithography and later found it was a process I could do at home without a press.  

You work in such a wide range of mediums, from embroidery to printmaking. What medium did you pick up first and how did you decide to move into others? 

Drawing and painting were my first mediums. Then filmmaking in high school, and printmaking in undergrad. I learned embroidery in a printmaking class, actually. I was making patches for a band I was in called Void Boys. I forgot to reverse the letter D so it looked like Voib Boys. Since I was printing on fabric my teacher suggested I carve out the words and embroider them on instead. She taught me a couple basic stitches and I started down a path of embroidered merch for my music projects that followed me up to Seattle. In 2020 and 2021, I even taught an embroidery merch-making class through the Vera Project. I have continued printing primarily on fabric as I still sometimes mix media and embroider prints. I like having the option to rework and go back into a piece with multiple processes. Photography is something that became more enmeshed in my art practice in the last 5 or so years.  

How did you end up in Seattle, and how does it compare to California for you? 

I moved to Seattle in February of 2020. My spouse is from Seattle and after living in San Francisco together for a few years, we decided to make the move here. Place is so important to me and my work. I feel at home in both California and Washington. I have more lived experience in Santa Maria and San Francisco, but I am feeling a sense of belonging in Seattle that I am really grateful for. You feel the seasons so much more in Washington. Additionally, I have a studio space here, which I never really had in California. Having that space has had a huge impact on my work. I’m working bigger, experimenting more, and have a good routine around my studio practice. 

Last year, you had a residency at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island as well as at the Fellow Ship Residency on Guemes Island. How has your time surrounded by water influenced your art? 

It’s funny, I hadn’t made that connection, but I do think it has given me a greater appreciation for bodies of water and all that they contain. I spent a lot of time on ferries, which was a new experience for me, and one I really like. I’m thinking a lot more about underwater landscapes and the plants and animals that inhabit them. I’m blending terrestrial plant and animal life and landscape with aquatic ones and finding they flow in a way that reminds me that both are natural spaces and that they share a lot of textures and forms. Something I have been interrogating for a while is how humanity tries to impose its will on the environment all the time, in so many ways. How our structures and modes of organization and control have an impact on the natural world in which we live, and the chaotic and persistent ways it resists, adapts, changes, and becomes nonexistent. I am interested in the spaces we create to admire and conserve nature and how they are access points for people to feel the gravity of their existence.  

Proximity to Water, currently featured in the Store’s alcove, is a composition of your photographs printed as lithographs and flashe vinyl paint on muslin. Describe your process in creating this work. 

My current process is pretty layered and I’ve only come into it within the last two years, although I have been painting and printing for much longer. I start with photography and edit the photos into “thresholds,” or highly contrasted black and white images. Then I get photocopies printed at my favorite copy shop—Aurora Prints. For a larger piece such as Proximity to Water, I lay out a puzzle of photocopies. I try to match the shapes of toner and areas of negative space until I come up with a cohesive composition. The backgrounds are made using water-thinned flashe vinyl paint that I brush around and pour to get an expressive abstraction. Sometimes the composition informs the way I create the underpainting and other times it’s strictly intuitive and left up to chance. Printing is done by hand and up against a wall using a brayer [ink roller] to create the pressure needed to transfer the image. Proximity to Water contains 10 different prints. Paper lithography involves wetting the photocopy with water and gum arabic then rolling up the image with viscous ink. The ink will stick to the toner and resist the white spaces of the image. I build up the composition print by print until it is complete. I lean into the imperfect with this process and find that very freeing and fun. 

Not only are you a visual artist, you're also a singer, songwriter, and guitarist. How does your music relate to your art? 

I think they are totally different and totally connected at the same time. Printmaking can feel like recording a live performance to tape and studio time reminds me of band practice. Both are ways in which I express myself and process my experiences and the world at large. Intuition and the feeling of something resonating with me on some level that I don’t completely understand comes through in both visual art and music making. I do what feels, looks, and sounds right to me. Visual art and music have been intertwined for a while. I’ve designed and printed shirts, made fliers for shows (sometimes embroidered), made 100 unique album covers for a Void Boys single, and made album cover designs for SOAR. Since moving to Seattle, I’ve switched gears a bit and have been focusing more of my time and energy on visual art, but I still write songs and play guitar.  

What’s next for your practice? 

I’m really excited about this body of work and the trajectory I’m on with this mix of painting and printmaking, so my plan is to continue in this direction. One thing on the horizon is I’m planning to move into a new studio space this year with my friend Willa Goettling that we will use for our own art practices, but that we also hope to use as an educational space where we can host community events and workshops. I’ve also got an art show coming up in June with my friends Jarita Hui and Taylor Pelella at Indigo Slate Gallery in Pioneer Square. I’m excited to see how my practice grows and just sort of taking it one day at a time.