AN ARTIST'S WAY OF SEEING

Here's guessing P.S. Dooley has a rich inner life. See for yourself on the walls of the Lorimier Gallery.

A woman barks into a loudspeaker before a Rockettes line of pink flamingoes. In "He Remembers When She was Young," a man walks on a covered bridge while a woman does a handstand. "Fantasy" is a menage of lips and bare shoulders.

She describes her art as "a way of seeing things -- and not a flat way of seeing things."

Friday, Dooley was the center of attention at the reception for her first solo show. The experience was new and not entirely comfortable for the Burfordville, Mo., artist. "It felt like I'm hanging all over these walls," she said.

Some people asked her to explain the images' meaning, but she politely declined because she doesn't know what to tell them.

"What I can find no words for is expressed in my art," she says.

She wishes she didn't have to give the works titles.

Most of Dooley's photo collages consist of "found" images, photographs taken by others and painstakingly cut out and married to other images to make something new and often surreally provocative. These images "beg to be joined," she says.

She uses a knife rather than manipulate the images in a computer because the feel of these photographs is part of the process for her. "It's an intense, wonderful, joyful, painful process," she says.

"I can't draw," she admits, "and I can't paint." What she does involves making emotional connections between images and colors.

Dooley grew up in Bloomfield, Mo., and graduated from Southeast with a degree in sociology. She worked in the criminal justice field in Memphis, Tenn., for 15 years before returning to this area in 1997.

Her newest work, such as "Golden State" and a mime series, incorporates her own photographs from Big Sur and San Francisco.

For her first show, Dooley for the first time had to put prices on her works and accept that some of them could be leaving her. Six of the 23 sold the night of the reception.

Friends flew in from California and a cousin came from Memphis for the reception and a surprise party in her honor afterward. "It's all very humbling," she said.

Dooley is moving to California at the end of the month to pursue her inner life in new directions.

People may not see the same things in a work of art but often respond in similar ways, she says.

"We share the same emotions and a lot of the same situations. We have different names and different time frames, but we're more the same than we are different," she says.