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Show me an artist, and I'll show you a split personality.

Dig around a studio and you'll find not one, but two or three styles of work, as if several artists shared the space.

"Most artists don't work in a totally linear fashion," says Kim Arthun. "People don't really see that when they see a one-person show. There are always different things going on and by seeing them, you get a peek into the artist's mind."

Arthun, one of the city's elite contemporary artists, decided to channel his inner Sybil in his new show at Exhibit/208 in Nob Hill.

Called "One Person Group Show," it spotlights two distinct Arthun styles and, like any of his exhibitions, is terrific.

On the one hand, we see digital photographs taken by Arthun of him and his dog on walks in the North Valley. Arthun shoots without a viewfinder and the resulting images are a mesmerizing blend of form and shadow, the real and the reflection.

These are wonderful, whimsical pictures that tell stories through the power of suggestion. They challenge the imagination and create bold graphic images in the interplay of leashes, walls, fences, rocks, animal tracks, blades of grass and specks of dirt.

In "TongueGinashadow," we see a closeup of the dog's snout, and her whole body in shadow. It's a fascinating portrait.

Arthun also gives us a new take on his signature abstract collages. He builds them from all kinds of paper and other material he cuts up and saves then glues onto a canvas.

"I have huge stacks of stuff," Arthun says. "I'll edit them at a particular time and go through and pick out things that end up being that body of work."

His new pieces are different in two ways. They're simpler. Arthun was drawn to a scrap of white material he had used in an earlier, complex collage.

"I asked myself, `Why am I making these more complex?' " he says.

He took some of the white paper that was left over and used it in each of the new works, combined with one other piece of material, separated by a mat.

"Each is two pieces of collage material," he says.

He was able to re-use the paper because he did the collages on a scanner, also new for Arthun.

He placed the pieces upside down on the screen, used a monitor to get them into just the right artistic place, scanned them and printed them.

The pieces are minimalist in composition and intriguing in detail - wrinkles in the paper, shadows in and around the collage pieces intensified by the mat.

The effect is free-flowing and dynamic, proof that, often, less is more.