The Wexner Center for the Performing Arts will host on February 27th & 28th Cellist and Composer Erick Friedlander who will bring to these live performances a haunting score that will illuminate a series of images from Mitch Epstein’s latest acclaimed volume of photographs entitledAmericanPower. Mitch Epstein’s latest project tackles one of the most loaded issues on the nation’s agenda: what and who powers America? Between 2003 and 2008, prompted by the evacuation of an environmentally contaminated Ohio town, Epstein traveled the United States to document the country’s energy “hot spots,” where fossil fuel, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind and solar power are produced, encountering further contaminations, Homeland Security obstacles, corporate invincibility and the occasional token of hope. In a post-Katrina and post-Patriot Act America, the angle of engagement permitted Epstein often varied, so that many of the power plants and refineries were shot from an enforced distance Epstein says about his images that they show “the relationship between American society and the American landscape”…with energy being the linchpin.
