Shannon Ebner

Jun 2 - Jul 16, 2022
  • Altman Siegel is pleased to present selections from Shannon Ebner’s recent body of work, FRET SCAPES. The neologism is in part based on the acronym FRET, the Forecast Reference Evapotranspiration Report that is generated by climate scientists to measure the rate at which water that falls to the ground will evaporate to the sky. Ebner has described the work as a weather event facing off with a group of images forecasting the social world.

    Ebner will be joined at Altman Siegel on June 2 at 6pm by David Senior, Head of Library and Archives at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, to discuss the artist’s recent work.

    Ebner’s website-publication project https://stray.world/ will be on view at the gallery. Additionally, printed copies of the publication will be on view for the duration of the exhibition.

  • "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

     

    Artforum Art Agenda | Art in America | Frieze TheGuide.art

  • S T R A Y . W O R L D is an online project by Shannon Ebner, designed and programmed by O-R-G (open reading group), hosted and developed with Source Type.

     

    https://stray.world

     

    Audio ON. Pop-up blockers OFF. (Printing works best in Chrome.)

     
  • 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.

  • For more information contact info@altmansiegel.com or 415.576.9300.