Images point to what is in the world; that is the problem with representation. I think that is why there has been so much activity around abstraction — it offers one possible way around the problem of pictures. I am looking for a way out of the problems of representation but I am not satisfied to leave the world of representation all together. I am somehow looking to stay in the world of depictive images by simply asking for more from them through developing a different system, idea or model of how they might function.

—Shannon Ebner

Shannon Ebner’s work centers on a do-it-yourself alphabet of handmade letters and signs temporarily placed—and strategically displaced—in public contexts. The artist sets language in the service of photography, her cryptic messages captured and fixed in black-and-white photographs. Populating actual yet uncertain landscapes or mise-en-scènes including California real estate sites, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Washington Monument, these ephemeral signs spell out such darkly ambiguous phrases as “Landscape Incarceration,”
“The Doom,” and “The Day—Sob—Dies.”

—Todd Alden

Shannon Ebner’s work centers on a do-it-yourself alphabet of handmade letters and signs temporarily placed—and strategically displaced—in public contexts. The artist sets language in the service of photography, her cryptic messages captured and fixed in black-and-white photographs. Populating actual yet uncertain landscapes or mise-en-scènes including California real estate sites, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Washington Monument, these ephemeral signs spell out such darkly ambiguous phrases as “Landscape Incarceration,” “The Doom,” and “The Day—Sob—Dies.”

—Todd Alden