Saturday, August 25, 2007

Every now and again something just jumps out, by gimleteye

Here's a new gallery show opening in Los Angeles, and a way of looking at the world with which I share a special affinity. Check it out.

Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait



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 only caveat about this series is that the prints 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. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007


This series will be exhibited at the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles, opening Sep 8. More info at www.paulkopeikingallery.com.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I will share this with my students and our “Environmental Awareness” club. There is a screen for the computer projector. First meeting scheduled for “tea and talk,” or rather “tea and bees.” I’ll bring the honey and we can discuss colony collapse disorder as well.
S

Anonymous said...

This is a cool thing.