Leporello N° 05 by Shannon Ebner

Shannon Ebner works primarily in photography. For Ebner, photog- raphy is a form of writing and writing is a way of seeing. A consistent element in Ebner’s work is that it treats language as a material form. Over the past two decades, Ebner has made four typefaces by photographing materials that are fashioned into Latin alphabets.

For Ebner’s leporello, the meteorological term RIME ICE is its single subject, though the phenomenon itself falls into two categories, soft or hard rime. In either case it is rime ice that forms when liquid droplets comprised of supercooled water freeze onto surfaces. RIME ICE is an outtake from Ebner’s recent exhibition FRET SCAPES (2022). FRET is acronym for the Forecast Reference Evapotranspiration Report, a report that is generated by climate scientists to measure the rate at which water that falls to the ground will evaporate to the sky.

Published in conjunction with Ebner’s exhibition ‘Fret Scapes (2022)’ at Kaufmann Repetto New York, 2022.01.07–2022.02.19.

For The Leporello Series, ll’Editions has invited a select group of international artists to contribute. Each artist is given carte blanche, restricted only by the accordion format and its ten panels (recto). To date, participating artists include Heimo Zobernig, Micah Lexier, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Ryan Gander & Shannon Ebner.

Inhabiting a space between book and paper sculpture, the Leporellos are printed on delicate Mohawk Superfine Eggshell paper. Each volume in the series is limited to 250 numbered copies and come in a bespoke rigid box, with the title hot foiled both on its front and on its spine, allowing it to sit comfortably in a bookshelf when not on display.

Shannon Ebner (b. 1971, New Jersey) lives and works in New York. Solo exhibitions have been presented at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford; ICA Miami, Miami; Fondazione Memmo, Rome, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and MoMA PS1, New York. Ebner’s work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions at museums and institutions such as Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; V-A-C Foundation, Venice; Tate Modern, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; ICA Boston, Boston; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow; and Künstlerhaus, Klagenfurt; among others. Ebner was included in the 10th edition of Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool; the 31st Biennial of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana; the Daegu Photo Biennial, South Korea; the 54th Venice Biennale, Venice; the 6th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art, Venice; and the 2008 Whitney Biennial, New York. Ebner’s work is included in numerous public collections in both the US and abroad. She is currently chairperson of the Photography Department at Pratt Institute where she is also the series editor for Pounds Per Image (PPI), a Pratt Photography Imprint that is co-published by Dancing Foxes Press. Ebner’s publishing projects include STRAY: A Graphic Tone (Fono/Roma, 2019), A Public Character (Roma Publications, 2015), Auto Body Collision (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2014), STRIKE (Mousse, 2013) and A Sun as Error (LACMA, 2009). Her website/publication STRAY WORLD will be published by Source Type in 2022.

A Public Character (Roma Publications)

Edition: 250
Dimensions: 148 × 191 mm
Format: Rigid Box, Leporello
Year: 2021
Design: Lundgren+Lindqvist
Publisher: ll’Editions