SF Beautiful & Soft Rock — Shannon Bodrogi

San Francisco Beautiful

These pieces were made for the SF Beautiful Muni Art Project - for which I received the SF Beautiful Muni Art Award. Five of the works were based on poetry, which accompanies each piece here. The other three were the beginnings of a somewhat abandoned series called The Sunset Walks, which is a love letter to the Sunset district of San Francisco that I called home for over a decade. Nourishment features imagery and a map of my favorite places to walk to including friends’ houses, restaurants, markets, and community gardens. Places that nourished my soul and body. The Avenues is another map of the sunset with a cacophony of images from photographs taken while walking around my beloved neighborhood. The Change Of Rust And Sand reflects on the shifting nature of sand as well as the erosion of metals that happens when living in a marine atmosphere near the beach. How change is inevitable, beautiful, and powerful.

Panderosa Blazing, 2019

paper lithography

Train Through Colma By tess Taylor

But will anyone teach
the new intelligence to miss
the apricot trees

that bloomed each spring
along these tracks?
Or the way afternoons

blazed with creosote
& ponderosa?
Spring evenings flare

with orange pixels
in the bay-scented valley—
where in the algorithm

will they account for
the rippling ponies
that roamed outside Fremont?

When the robots have souls,
will they feel longing?
When they feel longing,

will they write poems?

Sound Of The Sea, 2019

paper lithography

Baker Beach by Melissa Stein

Close your eyes on that startled
vision: fishing line strung taut
by the waves’ tall pressure: cold sugar
of a fish’s mouth clamping the bait’s steel
surprise. Hold fast against the tide, its spray
finer than pleasure against your sun-
ruddy face. Understand there’s nowhere
to go. I mean you have nowhere
you must go. What we trust is the sound
of the sea, its chill shock, our faith
in its change. Rolling together and under
and up and apart and on to the next
body. This is the pacific.

All Fog, 2019

paper lithography

The Long View by Randall Mann

Two lovers sit atop
Dolores Park: they stop
their argument to see
a church, a bridge, a sea.

They play a little game:
each man proceeds to name
his list of lovers, dead.
There’s no one left unsaid.

Anxious pigeons wait
for crumbs to fall. It’s late.
The weather starts to shift:
all fog, all love, will lift.

Weeping Caryatids’ Bird Song, 2019

paper lithography

Listening to the Caryatids on the Palace of Fine Arts by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

The curve of roof echoes the roll of golden
coast hills solidified in travertine
marble. In front, the reflecting pool’s eye,

where the dome, the city’s past, floats is split
by swans. Once a city built from redwood
plank and gold dust, until earth shook it down

to mud and ash. In 1915, twelve
plaster palaces bloomed from the ruined
Marina. For nine months, San Francisco
grew fat again with visitors and fame.

The exhibition ends. Palaces razed.
Only this mute Roman structure remains
crowned in weeping stone maidens who,

whisper back to us in sea wind, bird song.

Hidden Gems, 2019

paper lithography

The Antidote To Fascism Is Poetry by Matthew Zapruder

dear hidden gems
riding on the bus

your green glow
has something to say

to the artificial mind
alive in those buildings

where time’s spiders
were invented to eat

the continual terrible
boredom we emanate

looking down at our phones
instead of a tree

under that cloud
that looks like a door

Nourishment, 2019

paper lithography, acrylic, embroidery

The Avenues, 2019

paper lithography

The Change Of Rust and Sand, 2019

paper lithography, embroidery

Soft Rock

This series “Soft Rock” was made for a three-person show at Fleet Wood Gallery in 2018 featuring Ai Buenafe, Patricia Pauchnick, and myself. Everything in the show was textile-based with the theme of the softness of hard objects - specifically rocks, gems, and plastics. We liked the double meaning of soft rock, being a genre of music as well. My work played into this. The embroidered words I chose to accompany the printed imagery of plant/rock collages, were descriptions of gemstones. Words like Tone, Clarity, and Saturation are also used when describing music. The isolated and the combinations of words begin to have their own meanings outside of these two reference points and are open for interpretation.