Wallspace is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Los
Angeles-based artist Shannon Ebner. This will be the artist’s third solo
exhibition with the gallery.
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, October 2009
Over the past five years, Ebner has mined the porous territory of language
by photographing words and letters of her own construction in environments
that range from the landscape around Los Angeles to the space of the
artist's studio. Envisioned as both an exhibition and an ongoing project
series, Invisible Language Workshop sees Ebner broadening this investigation
to include the linguistic potential of the photograph itself, moving away
from photographing words and phrases towards a focus on the material
supports for both language and photography. Taking to task the question,
"when is a photographic sentence a sentence to photograph," Ebner constructs
a mercurial visual system that relies on depiction while also rejecting the
notion that a photograph must be exactly (or only) what we say it is.
Ebner’s recent exhibitions include the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York; Saints and Sinners, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA;
National + International Projects, P.S.1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, Long
Island City, NY; Learn to Read, Tate Modern, London; Uncertain States of
America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium, The Serpentine Gallery, London.
A book, The Sun As Error, was published this year by LACMA and coordinated
by Dexter Sinister. She will have a solo show at Altman Siegel Gallery, San
Francisco, in January of 2010.