“NAUSEA” stands in large, flimsy cardboard uppercase letters on a windswept grassy bluff overlooking the ocean. The “E” is battered, as though it has fallen over a few times in the setting-up process. The horizontals of the “A’s” are a bit too wide, awkward. The sliver of ocean beyond has a few waves incoming. It feels as if Hiroshi Sugimoto had stumbled on an existential drive-in-movie sign on his way to photograph a seascape. It also feels as though making this picture might have been fun—loading six letters into, say, a VW Golf hatchback, driving to the ocean, making a photograph. This is Shannon Ebner’s USA (2003).

Ebner’s signature work distills current American political rhetoric into a word or two in a landscape. She offers a more polemical follow-up to artists like Walker Evans or Ed Ruscha, who comment on the American scene by transcribing it; by photographing words, she takes a place in the 20th century’s long tradition of visual artists who focus on text. Ebner says that she wants to “take certain words out of circulation.” Some nouns have been so misused in recent American propaganda (e.g., “democracy,” “freedom”) that she decided to incarcerate them and their associates in photographs, to treat them as alien subjects, stiltedly constructing facsimiles in a rough Southern California terrain that recalls Hollywood back lots. She gives herself physical power over language while, with a certain self-conscious distance, suggesting that these words are the voice of an unpeopled land or an internal landscape.

In the luxuriant, nearly graphic black-and-white of Ebner’s Democratizing (2006), salt crystals spell the titular word, its middle letters overrun by wet dribbles. As with USA, we are looking at a commentary on American political discourse, but we’re also looking at a visual pun: the salt grains merge with bumps of pavement that merge into the grain of the photograph. Standing in front of the large image (more than three feet wide, more than two feet high), we could be looking at a crudely collaged sign, except for the slightly forced perspective of the water shrinking from the bottom to the top of the frame. The subject and even the angle of the camera—just akilter of head-on—evoke Evans’s Depression-era street photographs of advertisements. It is hard not to think of Ebner, albeit anachronistically, when viewing Evans’s Truck and Sign (1930), an image of the word “damaged” in huge block letters being lifted by workmen.

Ebner’s conjoined acuity for language and landscape have innumerable reference points, from Evans and Ruscha to Lawrence Weiner and Vik Muniz. Her most familiar mode of working, the documentation of ephemeral outdoor sculptural acts, has gained her comparisons to Robert Smithson. In a retort, her giant photograph OPIC (2007) shows the first half of the word “entropic” incised on a glistening blue surface fading into the reflected greenery outside Ebner’s Los Angeles studio-garage. In an e-mail to a friend, Ebner wrote, “I wanted to kind of fuck the word ‘entropic’ up because I was kind of miffed by its over usage.” Yet her riff on the cult of Smithson is more playful than cutting: OPIC runs closer to visual onomatopoeia than to critique, and more than anything represents an enticing foray into glistening color by an artist better known for austere black-and-white.

There is something so direct as to be illustrative about USA, Democratizing, and the like—something sloganeering. While researching this article, I was amazed at how eager Ebner’s fellow artists were to speak out for her and her photography. I came to wonder if this accord is partially because of the immediacy of the work’s legible imagery. In the moment of viewing, one quickly decides whether to agree, whether to affirm faith. This is not, of course, to trivialize the respect that Ebner gets. Her work has garnered a great deal of interest since a well-received New York solo debut at Wallspace Gallery, in 2005, and has been included in shows at the Whitney at Altria in New York and London’s Serpentine Gallery (both last year), among many others. In January 2007 she and artist Adam Putnam curated, to acclaim, “Blow Both of Us” at the alternative space Participant Inc. in New York; the exhibition was a gathering of artists—ranging from Jimmy De Sana and Mark Morrisroe to current East Village habitues—who use the camera crudely and honestly and find greater sustenance in a conversation among themselves than in the creation of commodities.