Chris Jordan has created some amazing art. He looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics in his latest work. 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. He hopes that the images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. He points out, and I think it is true, statistics tend to 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 $12.5 million spent every hour on the Iraq war. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.
These prints really must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. Please take a look for yourself the series is amazing. It can be found at www.ChrisJordan.com
