THE UNEASY WORLD OF KATHLEEN SHANAHAN

"Family Portrait with Punch & Shallaballa" by Kathleen Shanahan

"Witnessing the Toad Immortal" by Kathleen Shanahan

WICHITA, Kan. -- Kathleen Shanahan's paintings are mysterious, combining elements not ordinarily found together.

"I'm not out to dupe anybody but I like that paradox," she says. "I have a lot of unanswered conflicts in my own thinking. There's always a flip side."

Sometimes her juxtaposition of the photo-realistic and surreal creates an uneasiness she strives for.

"When things are going well you always wonder when the other shoe is going to drop," she says by way of explanation.

Shanahan's paintings will be exhibited at the University Museum beginning Monday and continuing through Sept. 29.

An opening reception for the artist will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. Monday at the museum. Shanahan also will give a public lecture at 3:30 p.m. Monday in Room 300 of the Art Building.

In 1994, Shanahan had a one-person show at the Artemisia Gallery in Chicago and also displayed work in the Kansas Watercolor Society Five-State Exhibition. Previously, her work was shown in the National Drawing Exhibition in Potsdam, N.Y., and in the "Missouri Artists: Works on Paper" traveling show sponsored by the Missouri Arts Council.

She has shown in nearly 100 juried and open exhibitions since 1970.

Shanahan's work is representational, figurative and also narrative -- it usually has a theme. Often it deals with personae who have been choreographed into a scenario through collage or worked in more directly or spontaneously, Shanahan says.

And these people are often the best of strangers.

"Usually I like to get strange bedfellows together sharing the same context," she says.

Pat Reagan-Woodard, the museum's director, likes the aura of mystery Shanahan's painting creates.

"Art shows you something new and asks questions. If it doesn't it's not art," Reagan-Woodard says. "And her works really ask questions."

Shanahan's works came to Reagan-Woodard's attention through Sarah Riley, who chairs Southeast's Department of Art. The two artist/professors have known each other since 1978, when both were teaching at colleges in Columbia.

Shanahan now is an associate professor of painting and drawing at Wichita State University. She is married to a corporate lawyer and they have 6- and 3-year-old children.

For Shanahan, art is the personal transfigured, sometimes humorously. Gnomes and dwarfs appear in her most recent works, or children are portrayed as circus acrobats who coexist with military training exercises.

"Lately I've been interested in disciplined parenting...It has to do with how active they are and how pummeled I feel and browbeaten," she says.

Painting also has an element of therapy for her. "I work through some of the conflicts I'm feeling about working and raising kids and being an artist and teaching at the same time," she says.

A wider view of her work reveals her fascination with theater traditions, male and female role-playing and androgyny in particular. The Japanese elements in her paintings owe much to a year as a visiting scholar at the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka, Japan.

Shanahan appropriates freely from different art eras and sources. She then recombines them into a hybrid that might as well be called her own.

Sometimes the images she works with have degenerated through the use of copying. "Sometimes I see things in those I like," she says.

Sometimes she works from models, creating an image she literally cuts out and creates a new surrounding for.

"I like to end up with what I imagine has a little bit of uneasiness," Shanahan says. "There are works that are visually pleasing...but maybe there's a little monkey wrench thrown in."