ABSTRACT
Liz Ellenwood's Wire Sketches engage black and white photography at its core—literally in black and white and tonally in true opposition to one another. Ellenwood has stripped the vaunted richness of gray tones in her gelatin silver prints and reduced her images to their lowest common denominator. The great truth Ellenwood so poetically references is inefficiency itself. For non-photographers it would not be relevant how she initially sets this stage through her process, though it is a great opening line. The inefficiency is the subject matter itself. Transmission wires lack efficiency. Through the process of transmitting power energy is lost. Only rare, highly expensive superconductors can transmit power with virtually no loss. The dawn of widespread individually generated renewable power and its subsequent storage will pit the individual, legislators, and energy corporations against each other in new and unprecedented ways.
