Visual Analysis: A Public Character- Shannon Ebner

Valeria Guillén

A Public Character

Shannon Ebner

ICA: Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL.

Shannon Ebner’s “A Public Character”s exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami imposes oversized “A” letters displayed onto different scales, techniques, mediums, time lapses and space.

Even if the letter “A” implies such an important sound for the Roman alphabet and our daily verbal communication, the exhibition, in general, is muted and invites the mind or the imagination of the viewer to explore the sound level of the visual experience presented. For the first room “Black Box Collision A” the presentation of outsize scaled photographs creates this ambiance of overwhelmed surrealism, rendering the images of the letter “A” “both part of the world and apart from it”. The size, volume, style varies from one picture to another but unifies the whole show through the use of monochromatic, grisaille palette which, because of their visual weight, creates this sense of construction, urban and/or industrial feeling.

Now, the experience of reading the exhibition becomes monotone and predictable as a result of the documentarian, archival, or catalogue approach of the piece creating this anti-narrative collection of photograph, sculptures and video. The accumulation or the visual element of repetition breaks finally with a digital video of 13 minutes titled “A Public Character” which time-lapses different “A” letters into various urban scenarios and even just the letter “A” in primary colors introducing words that you can hardly capture a few times just because of the speed and rhythm of the video during the last minutes that concludes the piece.

In a way, the letter “A” becomes public, available and reachable for every individual. It’s something we are able to recognize topographically. In an everyday sense its part of our verbal, graphic and audible quotidian trace. However, in what point this popular letter and sound intersects with what Art is? Is this poetry? Letters can become individually different even if we are just imitating the visual characteristics of the same one? At the end I believe that the visual experience that Shannon Ebner is offering to the viewer is social and at the same time very individualistic where the study of the letter A is applied into different recognizable contexts but at the same time our visual approach detaches this to a more personal level. The rapidly change of the environment or the landscape will always try to transform what we define as something to another thing by changing or influencing the perception of the self.