Shannon Ebner’s work centers on a do-it-yourself alphabet of handmade letters and signs temporarily placed—and strategically displaced—in public contexts. The artist sets language in the service of photography, her cryptic messages captured and fixed in black-and-white photographs. Populating actual yet uncertain landscapes or mise-en-scènes including California real estate sites, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Washington Monument, these ephemeral signs spell out such darkly ambiguous phrases as “Landscape Incarceration,”
“The Doom,” and “The Day—Sob—Dies.”

—Todd Alden