Wallspace is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Shannon Ebner. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Images point to what is in the world; that is the problem with representation. I think that is why there has been so much activity around abstraction—it offers one possible way around the problem of pictures. I am looking for a way out of the problems of representation but I am not satisfied to leave the world of representation all together. I am somehow looking to stay in the world of depictive images by simply asking for more from them through developing a different system, idea or model of how they might function. – Shannon Ebner, October 2009

Over the past five years, Ebner has mined the porous territory of language by photographing words and letters of her own construction in environments that range from the landscape around Los Angeles to the space of the artist’s studio. Envisioned as both an exhibition and an ongoing project series, Invisible Language Workshop sees Ebner broadening this investigation to include the linguistic potential of the photograph itself, moving away from photographing words and phrases towards a focus on the material supports for both language and photography. Taking to task the question, “when is a photographic sentence a sentence to photograph,” Ebner constructs a mercurial visual system that relies on depiction while also rejecting the notion that a photograph must be exactly (or only) what we say it is.

Ebner’s recent exhibitions include the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Saints and Sinners, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; National + International Projects, P.S.1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY; Learn to Read, Tate Modern, London; Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium, The Serpentine Gallery, London. A book, The Sun As Error, was published this year by LACMA and coordinated by Dexter Sinister. She will have a solo show at Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco, in January of 2010.