“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.

Ebner’s directness, though, is double-edged; her tools, when used by such a charismatic artist, may not only critique irresponsible obfuscations but also create them. In RAW WAR (2004), part of her 2003–05 series “Dead Democracy Letters” (which also includes USA), “raw” in six-foot-tall capital letters reflects in an oily grotto surrounded by palms. The “a” (with yet another too-wide horizontal) and its reflection combine to create a Star of David. This raises my hackles, as I read a conflation of Judaism, Zionism, and the current distressing war in the Near East. Here Ebner insinuates, whereas in her best work she articulates a psychological terrain. Leaving aside sloppy expressions of ideology, some technical flaws also worry me: the imperfect stillness of the reflection, the lack of contrast between the letters and the chaparral, and the bright verticals of the palm trunks all combine to bury the text in the frame.

The images in Ebner’s 2006–07 series “The Sun & the Sign” (which includes Democratizing and OPIC) are more compellingly rendered by the camera. The artist says that after the physical labor of setting up huge cutouts in the desert to make “Dead Democracy Letters,” she wanted to make the camera do its share of the work. Ebner cites as an influence Lee Friedlander’s series “Sticks and Stones,” published in book form in 2004. Although Ebner’s images lack Friedlander’s compositional athleticism, Ebner has arrived at a high-photographic enjoyment of how things look when photographed. Such passages as the crinkled plastic in Hollywood Recession (2006) and the smeared text on Plexiglas of Yes Tomorrow, No Tomorrow (2006) are as concerned with the poetry of surfaces as with poetic, intellectual, or political resonance.

Ebner’s impulse to venture into the barren Southern California desert is of a piece with a wider estrangement from the mainstream. In the 1990s she inhabited that slightly crunchy, left-leaning intellectual circuit that was so decidedly dismissed as an artistic dead end after, say, the 1993 “political” Whitney Biennial. She attended Bard College, traveled to Vermont to work with Bread and Puppet Theater (whose huge poetic-didactic manikins are an antecedent of her greater-than-human-size marks in the landscape), and later studied and worked with poet Eileen Myles. The downtown New York litterateur focused her on the work of language poets (looking at Ebner’s brief words and phrases so freighted with intent, I think of the work of Robert Grenier, who creates poems of just a few hand-drawn words) and Francis Ponge (whose poetry Ebner credits for the direct, formally self-conscious, thing-in-itself quality of her recent work). In 1998 Ebner chose to leave her New York scene and enter the Yale University School of Art, at a moment when her photography-student peers were luxuriating in the beauty and sweetness of images. Her fellow students recall her being at odds with the program’s dialogue and interested in the sculptural ramifications of her medium (at an early critique she created a cave of misexposed sheets of photographic paper). Though Ebner values the relationships she formed at the school, she says, “Yale was bad medicine.”

A few years after graduating, she left the East Coast for Los Angeles and reached the landscape and community of artists within which she has made her strong recent work. Ebner has discovered a surprising and invigorating combination of political art, language poetry, and landscape photography. One of my favorite images by her, Landscape Incarceration (2003), shows the fruits of this union of modes. In a scrubby plain somewhere in the Mojave, below delicate clouds and sun-bleached mountains, the enormous letters of the title stand, facing away from the viewer. The first excitement of seeing the photograph comes from seeing in it the solution to a problem: how to vivify three hidebound forms by their emulsification. But beyond that, the image—a bit wry, a bit mysterious—builds something totally unlikely, yet oddly right, into this grand and lonely view.

“Introducing Shannon Ebner” was originally published in the July-August 2007 issue of Modern Painters magazine.