Shannon Hozinec

Eniko Deptuch Vághy: Hello, Shannon! I’m very glad to have you as our Art Editor here at Lover’s Eye Press and am equally eager to discuss your artistry and creative process. 

Shannon Hozinec: Thank you, Eni!  I’m thrilled to be on board.

EDV: I first met you through your poetry—which is beautiful, by the way—but you’re also a very prolific visual artist and painter. When I look at your work, the words excavation, recovery, and remnant come to mind. I’m thinking of works like '[ ]' which features washers at the ends of pieces of metallic netting. It makes me think of a leather jacket recovered from beneath layers and layers of earth. Just really gripping, inspiring work, Shannon. Can you explain your creative process to our readers and tell us how you approach your pieces?

SH: There’s a part of me that hopes one day I’ll have a coherent answer for the process question, and a (larger, quieter but more insistent) part of me that suspects I never will.  I wish I possessed the dedication, or temperament, that it takes to develop a daily practice— I might have a more expansive body of work if I did—but I simply do not.  I’m too easily discouraged by what I perceive as failures (which will more often than not melodramatically blow up into a conception of myself as a total failure of an artist)— I do make it a point to fully indulge the times when I’m feeling inspired, though, to the exclusion of most anything else, and it’s within those times that I’m the most prolific. Most of the paintings created within a flood like that (which will typically last anywhere from a single ten-hour session to the course of a week) will be finished and be posted somewhere.  Anything I paint out of a sense of duty or anxiety will end up as ribbons or ashes.  Ashes of ribbons past.

I do find your use of the word ‘excavation’ intriguing, though, because it’s one I use often with regards to how I view art.  I’ve always seen the things I create, written or visual, as unconscious collaborations between a myriad of selves, and the act of creation a stitching together of things salvaged, in one way or another, from them.  Rot excised and mended, displayed; things discarded made new.

EDV: I’d also really love to know about your influences. When I first saw your art, I saw a lot of Francis Bacon, but since then I feel I’ve noticed different influences, which I hope to hear a little more about. What inspires you? Whose vision has shaped your own? 

SH: This is a difficult question to answer—I tend to think that I more gravitate toward artists because of inclinations I already possess, but then, how far back are we tracing that particular vein, you know?  I love anyone unafraid to follow impulse, who indulge the dark and dreamlike, anyone who actively resists the urge to temper or restrain their art merely for the sake of perceived coherence or some feint at ‘taste’ or expectations— Francis Bacon, certainly, and also Francesca Woodman, Louise Bourgeois, Kim Jakobsson, Iris van Herpen, Andrzej Dybowski, Sade English, Stephane Fromm, Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch.  Tons more.

EDV: As I previously said, you’re a writer as well as a visual artist—you’re an artist through and through. Do you feel like your visual art informs your writing and vice versa? Or do you feel like the realms these mediums occupy are discrete and unique? 

SH: I don’t see it as ‘informing’ one another as much as simply being ladled from the same pond, and any morphing in one medium will inevitably be reflected, eventually, in the other. I’m a ‘[create] your obsessions’ devotee, not in the ‘make a list and check all the boxes, let’s create a digestible pathway with fun roadside stops’ way, but ‘why wouldn’t you indulge your passions to the fullest extent when you feel the pull,’ and so many of mine that I’ve been able to retroactively identify—monstrosity, duality, madness, liminality, violence, yearning, body horror, existential terror, to name a few— have an infinite number of ways to be represented, and will always spill over into wherever else I’m creating at the time.

What I create is both from who I am and becomes who I am; it’s both what keeps me up at night and alive during the day.  I don’t understand people who create in different mediums but keep things clipped and sectioned and disparate, it feels too clinical to me, a sterile compartmentalization of self— which is not to say it can’t be done successfully, just not by me.  I’ve never been able to bloodlet, to bleed with direction and purpose, it’s always just been the gleeful squeezing of an open wound.  It gets everywhere.

EDV: Let’s jump into your collaboration with our Meghan Lamb in her latest work Mirror Translation. What was collaborating with Meghan like? How did you approach the art you made for her stories?

SH: As an artist, having my work on the cover of someone’s book was one of those lofty dreams that I never really thought would come to fruition— a ‘wow, wouldn’t that be nice’— it’s such an immense honor for anyone to choose your work to represent theirs, visually, as a first impression, but especially someone whose work you love.  I’ve long been an admirer of Meghan’s writing, even before we became friends— there’s a vulnerability and a viscerality to everything she writes that is compelling, revelatory— it speaks in its own haunting frequency, yet you always understand what she’s saying.

She first asked if she could use a painting I’d given her, DAUGHTER OF THE WALLS, for the cover, and then wondered if I’d be interested in creating several other pieces to accompany it, for the interior of the collection.  I think the only real ‘restraint’ she gave me was a practical one, that the interior paintings be in black and white, for publishing ease, and this is something I think I would’ve done anyway— I wanted the pieces to be cold and arresting and stark, for the palette to reflect what I saw in the setting, in the landscape of the stories, and also for their content— the human-adjacent faces, the familiar-yet-foreign arrangement of features, the uneasy unkiltering of what we know of typical physical humanity— to not be distracted from by too much color.  I hope I did it justice— it’s an exquisite, grotesque book.

EDV: Do you have any other projects coming up that you’re excited about? Or, since I’m asking you these questions at the beginning of the year, are there any projects you would like to devote more time to over the coming months?

SH: I’m as consistent with projects as I am with artistic practice, I’m afraid— I have many dormant visual projects (more like ‘series’) that I could pick up tomorrow, or never.  I’d like to finish my book this year.  I’ve been saying that every year for ten years, but what is an artist if not often a begrudging optimist, right?— that they’ll finish something, that people will see it, that it might mean something.  I’m hoping to branch out into music as well.

EDV: Tell me what you’re obsessed about. This can be a book, album, movie, but it doesn’t have to be. It also doesn’t have to be one thing. I just want to know what you can’t get out of your mind. 

SH: Ethel Cain’s new album, Perverts.  Natural chimeras, teratomas, vanishing twin syndrome, weird medical anomalies— I’ve made it a goal of mine to finally make it to the Mütter Museum this year.  I watched Harmony Korine’s ‘Trash Humpers’ for the first time recently and haven’t been able to get the weird little songs they wrote for the movie out of my head.  The concept of chemical memory.  Leonora Carrington.  I’m still wondering what, or who, stashed all those little critter bones I found a few months ago in a hollowed-out tree trunk in the cemetery.  Whether or not they intended to come back for them.  

EDV: Thank you so much for answering my questions, Shannon. I’m glad to have you on the team!

SH: I’m so glad to be here, Eni! 

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Shannon Hozinec is a poet and artist who lives in Pittsburgh, PA.  Her written work can be found in DIAGRAM, Salt Hill Journal, THRUSH, Action Books Blog, and elsewhere, and her artwork is on her website, www.shannonhozinec.com