Shannon Ebner's Giant Ampersand - Washington/Centinela (long)

The Hammer Museum Opens Shannon Ebner an exhibition on view July 16, 2011 -- October 9, 2011.

Los Angeles-based artist Shannon Ebner's work investigates the correlations between photography and language. Informed by various modes of writing—including poetry, experimental writing, and political speech—Ebner constructs images in the studio and the landscape. She builds letters and phrases out of vernacular materials such as cardboard, wood, and cinder blocks, calling attention to the ways language and imagery are constructed. For her Hammer Project, she will exhibit a portion of an on-going project called "The Electric Comma," which began as a poem she wrote of the same name about various conditions of the photographic, such as its alleged static nature and its vocation of describing events of the past. The poem, or as Ebner refers to it, "the photographic sentence," seeks to enliven the image by subjecting it to various challenges that ask the photograph to perform outside its usual function of reporting or depicting events, people, places, and things of our time.

n addition to the presentation at the Hammer, works from "The Electric Comma" are simultaneously on display at LAXART in Culver City and in Venice, Italy as part of the 54th Venice Biennale. Portions of "The Electric Comma" have been made into works that are exhibited in all three locations. At the Hammer, Ebner will present two multi-panel large photographic works in Gallery 6 on the courtyard level, and the project will continue outside the gallery with a new piece made specifically for the light boxes leading to the Billy Wilder Theater. The light box work will spell out the word "asterisk," an element of language and design that has long been featured in the artist's work, and the boxes will be on a timed lighting sequence so that particular letters and groupings of letters will continuously flash, suggestive of a signal or mechanism for sending and receiving information. In addition to photographs and a video on view at LAXART, Ebner will present an outdoor sculpture in an empty lot in Culver City. An 8-foot tall plywood ampersand titled 'and, per se and,' Ebner considers the form and meaning of the ampersand to signify the continual construction and/or incompleteness of meaning between the various aspects of the project and their diverse locations. The Hammer's presentation is organized by Anne Ellegood, Hammer senior curator.

LAXART is located at 2640 S. La Cienega. The outdoor sculpture is located at the northwest corner of Washington Boulevard at Centinela Avenue.

Shannon Ebner was born in Englewood, New Jersey in 1971 and lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned her BA from Bard College in 1993 and her MFA from Yale University in 2000 and she currently teaches at USC's Roski School of Fine Arts. Solo exhibitions include kaufmann repetto, Milan (2010); Altman Siegel, San Francisco (2010); Wallspace, New York (2009, 2007, 2005); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City (2007). Selected group exhibitions include The Spectacular of Vernacular, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2011); the 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2010); Saints and Sinners, The Rose Art Museum, Waltham (2009); The 2008 Whitney Biennial, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); Learn to Read, Tate Modern, London (2007); Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium, Serpentine Gallery, London (2006); The California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach (2006); The Plain of Heaven, Creative Time, New York (2005); and Monuments for the USA, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco. Ebner is also participating in the 2011 Venice Biennale this summer. This will be Ebner's first museum solo show on the West Coast.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• and
• sm