Kathleen McShane & Liz Rodda:
Headless Times
September 6 - October 19, 2025


Basket Books & Art is pleased to present Headless Times, a two-person exhibition of new work in drawing, painting and sculpture by Texas-based artists Kathleen McShane and Liz Rodda. This exhibition follows on a previous two-person exhibition of their work, Awkward, staged in the spring of 2023 at the Arts + Literature Laboratory, a contemporary arts center in Madison, WI. 

L'homme a échappé à sa tête comme le condamné à la prison.
Man escaped from his head like the condemned man from his prison.
-Georges Bataille, La Conjuration Sacrée, 1936

Kathleen McShane and Liz Rodda share an affinity for grammatical infrastructure, a syntax of landscape and form. Their baseline: the vast tableau of the west and the accreted material detritus of contemporary culture. Sly and referential, their work in painting, drawing, sculpture and video finds its expository capabilities enlivened through the shared framework of collage.   

In 1936 philosopher Georges Bataille and his peers founded the journal Acéphale (headless) to propound a break from rationalism and advance new mythologies centered on freedom and radical experience. This exhibition, Headless Times, offers up a fresh opportunity to reconfigure meaning in the face of irreconcilable atrocity, a suggestion that to-get-out-of-ones-head need not be an abnegation but is instead an opportunity for liberation from forces of power that seek to separate us from our bodily selves, an artistic revolt staged in service of the ecstatic: an etymological step outside of reason.   

Kathleen McShane (born Cleveland, Ohio) spent many years living in New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and now lives in a small town equidistant between Austin and Houston, TX. A 2025 Guggenheim awardee, McShane has a BFA in Painting, Printmaking, and Drawing from New York State College of Art and Design at Alfred University, NY and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, MI.

Liz Rodda (born Sacramento, CA) is an artist based in Austin, Texas and an Associate Professor at Texas State University, School of Art & Design. She moves between diverse media such as video, sound, installation, and drawing. Her videos are the result of investing found and recorded footage with unintended meanings through montage and installation. At the center of her drawing practice is speed and a reveling in the humility of having a body.