Shannon Ebner

Shannon Ebner
The Sun as Error, 2009
Signed Artist Book with Poster Insert

In her book "The Sun as Error", Ebner presents not only her photographs [SIC] but a range of instructional diagrams and illustrations dealing with signs, optics, as well as a small section of explanatory text and notes, all of which reflect the artist’s ongoing fascination with the interplay of written form with photography and the multiple meanings that can result.

The artist collaborated with Dexter Sinister (designers Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt) in the book’s production which draws upon the design legacy of Muriel Cooper, the first design director of MIT press and cofounder of the Visible Language Workshop. Cooper has been credited with ‘reorienting and repositioning the direction of an artist’s monograph’ (‘Photo-eye’ 2009) and the yellow asterix glyph screenprinted on the book’s cover is borrowed from a 1970s Visible Language Workshop produced poster. This symbol becomes a recurring motif throughout the book appearing in text and photographs. The use of the automated typesetting program ‘TEX’ that was first developed in 1974, provides the book’s unusual text formation, evident in the alternate visual presentation of its title, ‘THE * AS ERROR’.

The presence of the sun runs throughout the book - as conceptual entity and as natural phenomenon. Whether presented as symbol or with its trajectories of light traced in the photographic, Ebner implicates the sun’s centrality to our reading of the visual world.

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Shannon Ebner’s conceptually driven practice explores the visual, material and temporal circumstances of language using photographic means. Recent solo exhibitions include “THE SEAWEED SYNTHESIZER” at kaufmann repetto, New York; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Palo Alto; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Publications by Ebner include SUBSOUND (Apogee Graphics, Los Angeles); Stray World (SOURCE TYPE, Zurich); A Public Character (ROMA, Amsterdam); Auto Body Collision (Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh); STRIKE (Mousse Publishing, Milan); and The Sun as Error (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles). She is currently chairperson of the Photography Department at Pratt Institute where she is also the series editor for Pounds Per Image (PPI), a Pratt Photography Imprint co-published by Dancing Foxes Press.