Shannon Ebner

Opening reception Friday, February 16th, from 6-8pm

From February 16th – March 17th, 2007, Wallspace will present Shannon Ebner’s second solo show, The Sun & the Sign, a collection of new photographic works and drawings.

Known for her text-based photographs of large cardboard letters temporarily placed in the landscape, Ebner’s continued use of language, material and site attempts to locate language within a photographic landscape, where visual and textual modes of representation can be explored simultaneously. Through an active use of the camera, Ebner tries to “free language from its enslavement” (Mallarmé) by taking certain words and signs out of circulation for the occasion of the photograph. Even if only symbolically, Ebner's hand-made signs place language at the mercy of photography, where it can be scopically explored, reconsidered and possibly repossessed before slipping back into the flow of circulation.

Consistent in all of the work is a visceral and direct experience with language as material, as well as a continued insistence on a certain economy of materials. Language is alive in The Sun & the Sign and treated as a physical entity, subject to injury, decay and time.

In the past year Shannon Ebner's work has been included in “Trace,” at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, “The 2006 California Biennial,” at The Orange County Museum of Art and “Uncertain States of America,” at The Serpentine Gallery, London. This spring, she will be included in “Learn to Read,” at the Tate Modern, London.

Shannon Ebner
The Sun & the Sign