Shannon Ebner

Shannon Ebner’s work exists at the boundaries of photography and sculpture, architecture and image, seeing, reading, and writing. Earlier photographic work centered on an alphabet of handmade letters and signs temporarily placed—and strategically displaced—in public contexts. Populating actual yet uncertain landscapes or mise-en-scènes including sites in California, 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.” More recent works explore different writing technologies including LED signs as well as the portable changeable message signs commonly used on highways. Her most recent solo exhibition, Auto Body Collision, was presented by the Fondazione Memmo at the Palazzo Ruspoli in Rome, Italy. Noteworthy group exhibitions include Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language at the Museum of Modern Art, NY (2012); the 54th International Venice Biennale (2011); Sixth Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2010); Les Recontres d’Arles 2010/41st Edition, Arles, France (2010); 2008 Whitney Biennial, New York (2008); and Learn to Read, Tate Modern, London (2007). Solo projects have been exhibited at the Hammer Museum (2011) and PS1 MoMA (2007). Ebner works in Los Angeles and is represented by Altman Siegel in San Francisco, Wallspace Gallery in New York, Kaufmann Repetto Gallery in Milano, and Sadie Coles in London.