To explore the relationship between verbal language and photography, Shannon Ebner (Born 1971 in Englewood, NJ) literally builds letters, words, and phrases from sundry materials and then sites and photographs them. She constructs imagery using language that is itself constructed.
In Yes Tomorrow, No Tomorrow, the words are barely visible, traced in a haze of stray black paint that floats in front of the picture plane and obscures the depiction of a green and golden hill. This threshold of visibility in the photographic image mirrors the uncertainty imbued in the phrase’s oscillation of “yes” and “no.” Through such careful interposition of text and image, Ebner’s work reminds us how profoundly imbricated vision is with the material substance of things, and how much meaning depends on the context of encounter.
