Hammer Projects / LAXART

16 July, 2011 - 9 October, 2011

Hammer Museum / LAXART, Los Angeles

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Hammer Projects: Shannon Ebner

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 exhi- bit 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.

In 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 madespecifically for the light boxes leading to the Billy Wilder Theater. The lightbox 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 ti- med lighting sequence so that particular letters and groupings of letters willcontinuously flash, suggestive of a signal or mechanism for sending and receivinginformation. 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.