Rebecca Camhi gallery and Sadie Coles HQ are happy to present the first solo show of Shannon Ebner in Athens A PATTERN TO THE LETTER. The show brings together her recent video A PUBLIC CHARACTER alongside a series of works from her ongoing photographic series Black Box Collision A.
Black Box Collision A, which recurs throughout the video, is an ongoing series (begun in 2012) of large photographs of the letter ‘A’. Found on walls, vehicles, electronic surfaces and the tops of building façades, each photograph is the result of close observation of a redundant vestige of sign, advertisement, message, or other mode of visual communication. Devoid of their original context and printed to human scale, Ebner’s A’s both inside and outside the box of the gallery collide like bodies in space, bodies in camera, and definite and indefinite articles sounding out a pattern to the letter.
A PUBLIC CHARACTER - edited by Erika Vogt with field recordings by Alex Waterman, and images by Timothy Schenk - was commissioned for Ebner’s recent ICA Miami exhibition in 2015- 16. The video is an intricate collage of black-and-white photographs, sound, and quick-fire sequences of text. It extends Ebner’s interest in language as a structural and metaphorical device. The video is dominated by text culled from her research into Hudson Yard’s real estate project – a rezoning of 28 acres of the West Side of Manhattan that will result in a transformed public landscape, rewriting the public character of the neighbourhood and its citizens.
Shannon Ebner (b.1971, New Jersey) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work encompasses photography, video, sculpture and installation. Her works frequently explore the nature of writing and its meaning, with the work acting as a form of writing, and the writing, in turn, a way of seeing.
