CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/2/2015

Shannon Ebner: Auto Body Collision

In Shannon Ebner's newest artist's book, releasing this week from the Carnegie Museum of Art, essayist Alex Klein writes, "Since 2007 Ebner has embarked on a series of publications of her photographic letterforms as images, poems, grids, landscapes and test patterns. Spread across time and different in format, these books may be read together or as individual 'stanzas' extracted from a larger body of text. Yet because of the extended periods of time between production, publication and distribution, they also sit outside of a linear experience of the written word. Rather than provide a continuous experience of reading, they are instead traversed by a sense of delay and feedback. In this, her latest book, Auto Body Collision, words move rhythmically across the page and then suddenly accelerate to an up-and-down motion until a reader is thrust into the abstracted forms of Ebner's visual lexicon. On the page, the camera collides with the matter of the world, but it also reorients the way we read it. In Ebner's photographs and sculptures, 'signs' inevitably play with and loop back to the role of signification, but they also disrupt it, simultaneously giving us direction… and in an absurd gesture, pointing us nowhere in particular."