Arts Discovering Jordan
posted by October 12 at 12:35 PM
onSeattle photographer Chris Jordan is like the fabled prophet who is unacceptable in his hometown. He is truly a poet of the trash heap, unearthing the meaning behind the massive quantities of refuse generated by Americans every single day. Past displays have included Intolerable Beauty, which featured richly textured landscapes of sawdust and abandoned freight cars and Portraits of Katrina presenting phenomenally detailed images of the flotsam and jetsam left behind in New Orleans. Despite a slew of remarkable exhibits in New York, San Francisco and at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, we have yet to see a significant showing of Jordan’s work here on his home turf.
Jordan’s current exhibit at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, called Running the Numbers, is extraordinary.
From Jordan’s statement:
This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. My underlying desire is to affirm and sanctify the crucial role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
Comments
Wouldn't a bell curve be a wiser use?
Dude was on Colbert last night, acknowledged his physical resemblance to Clark Kent, made some good points.
I used to be a big Chris Jordan fan, but his overtly themes and his reliance on manipulated images has swamped his art. His stuff looks like an ad campaign now. the wall of shipping containers or the mountain of sawdust were beautiful.
Make that "overtly political themes".
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