Shannon Ebner
A Public Character
A catalogue of the performance, video and word artist Shannon Ebner accompanying a museum exhibition in Miami picks out various typographical elements from her work. The result is the virtually seamless transposition of the art into the book medium, with the designer appearing as a book artist in the traditional sense. For example, different representations of the letter A in black and white - which Ebner isolates from signs, advertising posters, building signage, and so on, and then reintroduces into the public space on posters - are placed on uncut, twice-folded sheets so that an A stands on each page in the book. As a result, the fundamental components of the book and the process of its creation are made clearly visible. In another section of the book, a narrow, tall paper work by Ebner with black text is divided horizontally into segments, each occupying a double page in the book, so that the work is reconstituted as the reader leafs through. The contrasting blacks and whites characteristic of a number of the works are reflected in the typography of the accompanying essays, providing echoes of the ‘noir' genre.
