Shannon Ebner

Like musical scores, the text-based works of Los Angeles–based artist Shannon Ebner (born 1971) literalize and make visible the intervals and suspensions inherent in language. Her alphabets explore language’s “other"—hovering presences like silence, nonverbal communication, misspellings, handwriting—and emphasize what written language commonly represses or takes for granted in order to function. But the mechanical processes of language break down under Ebner’s close scrutiny; text and language are revealed as eminently physical, concrete manifestations of supposedly immaterial ideas.

In her new artist’s book, Strike, Ebner slows down the pace of reading to its zero degree—one letter, one page. With each letter looming as a monumental, monolithic symbol, Strike fosters a reading experience akin to our first decodings of the written word, when we started, as children, to learn how to do things "by the book.”