Shannon Ebner: WET WORDS IN A HOT FIELD

Altman Siegel is pleased to present WET WORDS IN A HOT FIELD, Shannon Ebner’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.  

For this new body of work, Ebner translates the camera’s language, originally culled from 35mm DSLR instruction manuals, into a series of large-scale photographic text fields.

Devoid of the original context and taking on a poetic form, the repurposed phrases turn on the device posing questions about the medium of photography itself — how do we frame? Who and what can be captured and by what means? What tries to escape, can’t be seen, refuses or is present but invisible? Ripe with transitory visual elements such as condensation, motion blur, and the touch of a human hand, our attention is directed to the surface, production, and authorship of the image.  In this field, subject positions, subjectivities, and the movement of the two in and out of the frame challenge notions of representation.