Shannon Ebner

"Ebner explains the structural development of FRET, 2022...: a large-scale layout of a poem in five columns (or perhaps stanzas) that was ambitiously installed on a wall, as if typeset in a scriptorium run by giants. She states: 'FRET, acronym for the Forecast Reference Evapotranspiration . . . is a report generated by climate scientists to measure the rate at which water that falls to the ground will evaporate to the sky. . . . The alphabet was constructed with a set of paper letters approximately the size of an outstretched hand. To photograph the letters, I pasted them to the inside of a building with water. Handling the wet letters was a delicate act. By the time I would get from A-Z the letters would dry and fall to the ground. Sometimes a corner or edge might keep its grip, but most would succumb to gravity quickly, leaving the photographed environment looking like an alphabetic field in disarray, a vanishing act of language.' One thinks of long-lost ancient tablets ravaged by the elements, or turned to dust."

 

– Coleman, Charity, “Shannon Ebner,” Artforum, April 1, 2022

 

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Shannon Ebner is an artist whose work explores the visual, material and temporal circumstances of language, mostly using photographic means. Attuned to the institutional, individual and communal uses of language, Ebner's work is especially concerned with how language appears (in terms of its typography and modes of inscription); where it appears (in terms of its site, physical or virtual, and its relation to architecture); and to whom (if anyone) some example of language is attributed. Through photographs, books and installations, Ebner raises compelling, and sometimes disquieting, questions about the way these aspects of language coincide and contribute to our sense of identification, relation, voice and trust in any given instance.