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.