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Dia Art Foundation Announces a Web-based Artwork: Language Is Wild by Shannon Ebner

Launching on April 12, 2012, Language Is Wild is a web-based project designed exclusively for Dia’s website.

Dia Art Foundation presents its 35th Artists’ Project for the Web by artist Shannon Ebner, entitled Language Is Wild (2012). In this new work, Ebner presents an interactive collection of photographs and texts depicting various systems of recognition. The project can be seen beginning April 12, 2012, at www.diaart.org/ebner.

Launch Event
A launch and reception will be held at Dia:Chelsea on April 12, 2012, at 6:30 pm on the fifth floor of 535 West 22nd Street, New York City. A conversation between the artist and Dia’s curator Yasmil Raymond will begin at 7 pm.

Description
Best known for her photographic and sculptural investigations of language, Shannon Ebner has long been interested in exploring both visual and textual modes of representation. For her first web-based artwork, Language Is Wild, commissioned by Dia and made in collaboration with New York-based designers Kloepfer-Ramsey, Ebner has composed an interactive sequence of still images prompting exploration of various combinations of language and image. Utilizing the cursor as a means to “rest” and “unrest” images moving continually across the screen, Language Is Wild asks us to negotiate with the work using a simple binary: “YES” or “NO.”

Artists' Projects for the Web
In 1995, Dia initiated a series of web-based artworks, becoming one of the first arts organizations to foster the use of the World Wide Web as an artistic and conceptual medium. Dia’s collection currently holds 34 commissioned web projects, including Sue Tompkins’s My Kind Book (2011), Cecelia Edefalk's 24-Hour Venus (2010), Lisi Raskin's Warning Warum (2009), Dorit Margreiter's alphabet (2009), Liliana Porter's Rehearsal (2008), Barbara Bloom's Half Full—Half Empty (2008), Rosa Barba's Vertiginous Mapping (2008), Ezra Johnson's Wrestling with the Blob Beast (2008), and Wilfredo Prieto's A Moment of Silence (2007), among others. To view these projects, visit www.diaart.org/artist_web_projects.

Funding
This commission is made possible in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency. Beverages for the launch event are compliments of Brooklyn Brewery.

Shannon Ebner
Shannon Ebner was born in 1971 in Englewood, New Jersey, and received her BA from Bard College in 1993 and her Masters of Fine Arts in 2000 from Yale University School of Art. She has participated in the Whitney Biennial (2008); the 6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2010); and the Venice Biennale (2011). Solo projects include MoMA PS1, New York (2007), and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011). This spring Ebner’s work will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the exhibition Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.



Dia Art Foundation
A nonprofit institution founded in 1974, Dia Art Foundation is renowned for initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving art projects. Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, opened in May 2003 in Beacon, New York, on the banks of the Hudson River as the home for Dia’s distinguished collection of art from the 1960s to the present. The museum, which occupies a former Nabisco printing factory, features major installations of works by a focused group of some of the most significant artists of the last half century, as well as special exhibitions, new commissions, and diverse public and education programs. Dia:Chelsea is located on West 22nd Street in the heart of New York City’s gallery district which it helped to pioneer. Currently open for artist lectures and readings, Dia is developing plans to expand its presence in Chelsea.

Dia also maintains long-term, site-specific projects. These include Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) (1988), and Dan Flavin’s untitled (1996), in Manhattan; The Dan Flavin Art Institute, in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany; Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah; and De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), in Quemado, New Mexico. For additional public information, visit www.diaart.org.

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