Shannon Ebner (born 1971) is an American artist based in

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

. She was born in

Englewood, New Jersey Englewood is a city in Bergen County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey, which at the 2020 United States census had a population of 29,308. Englewood was incorporated as a city by an act of the New Jersey Legislature on March 17, 1899, from por ...

. Ebner's artwork takes the form of photographs and poems that question the limits and ambiguity of language.

Career

Ebner received her BA degree from

Bard College Bard College is a private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The campus overlooks the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains, and is within the Hudson River Historic ...

in 1993. Before she entered

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

in 1997, she stopped her photographic practice to focus more on her work as a poet. She participated in the

St. Mark's Poetry Project The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church was founded in 1966 at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery in the East Village of Manhattan by, among others, the poet and translator Paul Blackburn. It has been a crucial venue for new and experimental poetry ...

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

and worked for the writer

Eileen Myles Eileen Myles (born December 9, 1949) is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. No ...

. Although Ebner is no longer a poet, she takes her inspiration from poems and looks for ways to include poetry within her photographic work. She graduated from Yale in 2000. From 2010 to 2018, Ebner taught the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...

's Roski School of Art and Design. In 2018 she was named chair of

Pratt Institute Pratt Institute is a private university with its main campus in Brooklyn, New York (state), New York. It has a satellite campus in Manhattan and an extension campus in Utica, New York at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. The school was ...

's photography department.

Process

Ebner takes her photographs in black and white. In an interview with Mousse Magazine, Ebner explained that she believes black and white "means a way of seeing the world that doesn't exist in reality; it's a way of seeing the world that is about difference." Ebner claims a photographer always has the choice to keep the colour or discard it. This means that the choice between colour and black & white is always an act of discarding the color information of the images. For Ebner, photography is about the lines of action: writing with blank ink on a world that's in shades of grey.

Themes

Portraits The first well known portrait made by Shannon Ebner is called: ''Portrait of My Ex-Girlfriend'' (1998). The picture was taken while she was a graduate student on Yale's MFA program. Ebner placed the picture in a jar of water and left it there while she embarked on a road trip to

Nova Scotia Nova Scotia ( ; ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is one of the three Maritime provinces and one of the four Atlantic provinces. Nova Scotia is Latin for "New Scotland". Most of the population are native Eng ...

where she hoped to meet

Robert Frank Robert Frank (November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019) was a Swiss photographer and documentary filmmaker, who became an American binational. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled ''The Americans'', earned Frank comparisons to a modern-da ...

. When she returned, she took the lid off the jar exposing the blurred picture resulting to be ''Portrait of My Ex-Girlfriend.'' The submerging of photographs in jars filled with water is a method that Ebner kept using during her career. The photograph ''Paging Walter (2009)'' was made the same way. Ebner shot a portrait of Walter Benjamin and exposed the picture to the same process: because of the solubility property of water, the photographs emulsion sloughed off, leaving behind a ghostly trace of the original print. Language Language is the main subject in the photography of Ebner's career. Her work is an exploration of language and

sign systems A sign system is a key concept in semiotics and is used to refer to any system of signs and relations between signs. The term ''language'' is frequently used as a synonym for a sign-system. However, the term ''sign-system'' is considered preferab ...

. "Ebner often takes symbolic or linguistic signifiers and detaches them from their usual contexts. She uses language in unexpected and multi-layered ways, with puns, palindromes and borrowed phrases."

Public collections

Ebner's work is included in the permanent collections of the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), ...

and the

Guggenheim Museum, New York The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue on the corner of East 89th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a continuously exp ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ebner, Shannon 1971 births Living people Yale University alumni American women photographers Bard College alumni 21st-century American women artists