Artist Talk: Kate Shannon

Beeler Gallery "FotoFocus: Haunting" exhibiting artist Kate Shannon will conduct an artist talk on September 24th at 1 p.m. in DSB 127

Kate Shannon is an associate professor at The Ohio State University Mansfield. Through making, teaching, writing, and curating, her work critically engages our relationship to photographs. Her creative work has been exhibited widely, including at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Elmhurst Art Museum, and Masur Museum of Art. She has received support from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, the Coca-Cola Critical Difference for Women Grant, and Ohio State University’s Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning. She has also received Ohio State University Mansfield’s awards for both Excellence in Teaching and Excellence in Research. In 2025–26, she served as Ohio State University’s Artist Laureate, traveling across Ohio to connect with underserved communities through photography. She is currently engaged in a curatorial project centered on the Floyd and Marion Rinhart Collection of Early American Photographs at Ohio State’s Rare Books & Manuscripts Library. In 2024, she presented on the collection at The Daguerreian Society Symposium in Houston, Texas, and she is currently curating an exhibition drawn from the collection to take place at Ohio State’s Thompson Library Gallery in autumn 2027. Kate lives in Hilliard, Ohio, with her husband, children, and cat.

"My creative interests revolve around photography. I begin visual projects by creating or stealing digital photographs. I then spend time at a computer screen meticulously erasing, expanding, rearranging, or animating the tiny pixels that form them. In this way, the photograph is not the end result, but a foundation for further research, discovery, and invention.

I created this piece more than a decade ago while exploring archival imagery related to the United States’ involvement in World War II. Among the materials I studied were filmed interviews with members of the Enola Gay flight crew, recorded shortly after the plane dropped the atomic bomb Little Boy on Hiroshima, Japan. I was interested in the tension between these intimate, close-up interviews and the distant images of the bombing that circulated widely in the United States. The figure in this piece is William Sterling Parsons, the weaponeer on the Enola Gay who was assigned to arm the bomb in flight. Here, Parsons is extracted from his interview and placed in a silent, flickering loop, indefinitely arrested within the image."

- Kate Shannon