A light, sharp political humor infuses the photographs of Shannon Ebner, an artist from Los Angeles. Ebner’s work centers on a do-it-yourself alphabet of handmade letters and signs temporarily placed—and strategically displaced—in public contexts. The artist sets language in the service of photography, her cryptic messages captured and fixed in black-and-white photographs. Populating actual yet uncertain landscapes or mise-en-scenes including California real estate sites, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the Washington Monument, these ephemeral signs spell out such darkly ambiguous phrases as “Landscape Incarceration,” “The Doom,” and “The Day-Sob-Dies.”

Ebner’s work has been included in Trace at The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, Uncertain States of America at The Serpentine Gallery in London, Learn to Read at the Tate Modern, London and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.