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, Strikefosters 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."

"The Los Angeles based artist Shannon Ebner extends her exploration of photography, sculpture and language in this remarkable book, The Sun as Error. In collaboration with Dexter Sinister (design duo David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey), The Sun as Error re-investigates the meaning and language of photographs, creating both an open-ended reading of her practice and also rethinking the idea of an artist's monograph."--Publisher's website.

This book was published after Shannon Ebner's exhibition 'A Public Character', held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Ebner's work is an extended mediation of language that often takes the form of photography. Certain aspects, especially seen in the ongoing series 'Black Box Collision A', represent her efforts to reflect upon our experience of language at the intersection of landscape and architecture, looking to the social world as a realistic, concrete location of poetics found and made; observed and constructed. Also included are the works 'A Hudson Yard', 'A Self', and 'A Singular', as well as the title work 'A Public Character'.00Exhibition: Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, USA (08.10.2015-17.01.2016).

Words Without Pictures was originally conceived of by curator Charlotte Cotton as a means of creating spaces for thoughtful and urgent discourse around current issues in photography. Every month for a year, beginning in November 2007, an artist, educator, critic, art historian, or curator was invited to contribute a short, un-illustrated, and opinionated essay about an aspect of photography that, in his or her view, was either emerging or in the process of being rephrased. Each piece was available on the Words Without Pictures website for one month and was accompanied by a discussion forum focused on its specific topic. Over the course of its month-long life, each essay received both invited and unsolicited responses from a wide range of interested partiesstudents, photographers active in the commercial sector, bloggers, critics, historians, artists of all kinds, educators, publishers, and photography enthusiasts alikeall coming together to consider the issues at hand. All of these essays, responses, and other provocations are gathered together in a volume designed by David Reinfurt of Dexter Sinister. Previously issued as a print-on-demand title, Aperture is pleased to present Words Without Pictures to the trade for this first time as part of the Aperture Ideas series.

Ecstatic alphabets/Heaps of language is a group exhibition on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from May 6 to August 27, 2012. It brings together forty-four modern and contemporary artists and artists' groups working in all mediums including painting, sculptutre, film , video, audio, spoken word, and design, all of whom concentrate on the material qualities of written and spoken language--visual, arual, and beyond. This book--a volume in the continuing series, Bulletins of the serving library, published by Dexter Sinister--is that artist team's contribution to the exhibition.

Photography Is Magic draws together current ideas about the use of photography as an invaluable medium in the contemporary art world. Edited and with an essay by leading photography writer and curator Charlotte Cotton, this critical publication surveys the work of a diverse group of artists, many working at the borders of the "art world" and the "photography world," all of whom are engaged with experimental ideas concerning photographic practice and its place in a shifting photographic landscape being reshaped by digital techniques. Readers are shown the scope of photographic possibilities in the context of the contemporary creative process. From Michele Abeles and Walead Beshty to Daniel Gordon and Matthew Lipps, Cotton has selected artists who are consciously reframing photographic practices using mixed media, appropriation and a recalibration of analog processes. Cotton brings these artists together around the idea of magic, the properties of illusion and material transformation that uniquely characterize photography. Beautifully produced and critically rigorous, Photography Is Magic is aimed at younger photo aficionados, students and anyone interested in gaining a deeper understanding of contemporary photography. It includes images and text by more than 80 artists, including Sara Cwynar, Shannon Ebner, Annette Kelm, Josh Kline, Elad Lassry, Jon Rafman, Shirana Shahbazi and Sara VanDerBeek, among many others.

This is a catalog to accompany an exhibition of the same name held at the Columbus Museum of Art from October 7, 2016 to January 8, 2017