Shannon Ebner

Like musical scores, the text-based works of Los Angeles–based artist Shannon Ebner (born 1971) literalize and make visible the intervals and suspensions inherent in language. Her alphabets explore language's "other"—hovering presences like silence, nonverbal communication, misspellings, handwriting—and emphasize what written language commonly represses or takes for granted in order to function. But the mechanical processes of language break down under Ebner's close scrutiny; text and language are revealed as eminently physical, concrete manifestations of supposedly immaterial ideas. In her new artist's book, Strike, Ebner slows down the pace of reading to its zero degree—one letter, one page. With each letter looming as a monumental, monolithic symbol, Strike fosters a reading experience akin to our first decodings of the written word, when we started, as children, to learn how to do things "by the book."

Using photography as a language, Shannon Ebner (born 1971) examines the signs, symbols, letters, words and graphical icons we encounter in the world. Auto Body Collision documents Ebner's most recent ongoing project, a multipart series of photographs that began on a trip to Italy in 2014. Ebner has been collecting language taken from signs, seeking out repetitions of terms such as "Auto Body Collision" and "Automotive." In dissecting found language and coupling it with her own, Ebner establishes connections between the terms "auto," "body," "motive" and "collision." The themes of Ebner's new work include the circulatory and the network, performance and its relationship to the body, and collision, in terms both literal and conceptual.
Auto Body Collision, designed in collaboration with the artist, includes more than 150 never-before-published photographs, as well as essays by Alex Klein, Tina Kukielski and Mark Owens.