Powerful Art

[Outta here]

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 underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

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



Skull With Cigarette, 2007 [based on a painting by Van Gogh]
72x98"

Depicts 200,000 packs of cigarettes, equal to the number of Americans who die from cigarrette smoking every six months.

Partial zoom:

Zoomed closer:

Detail at actual print size:

This artist has a quite an array of astounding pieces that really drive home some important messages. Check it out.
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[iARTthere4iam]

No wonder it' s hard to make a living as an artist.

 

[karrie]

wow. so neat.

 

[darkbeaver]

Is he saying the cigarretts built the art piece, the little packs are like the atoms of the whole cost of cigarrettes and going the other way too it's a circle back to the offices of the people who killed yer granny and made tobacco a dominant life form on the planet the friction greated by hte wieght of the cost of tobacco addiction is heavy why does the planet carry it? death can be convieniently arranged it grows on trees who would do such a thing? bankers I bet, yer dead cha-ching .

 

[darkbeaver]

it would look better at a distance like he said, id buy it because it speaks to me, I smoke.

 

[Outta here]

DB - did you click on the link? There's tons more - I think he's just making a statement about certain social issues of the day, in a pretty unique way.

 

[L Gilbert]

That's coool!!

 

[karrie]

It's neat.

But.

With modern computer capabilities, are any of these pieces he's actually made? Or just pieces he's drafted on the computer? They talk about how big they would be, not how big they are.

 

[Outta here]

Well yes, you could be right about that - I hadn't thought of it that way... but then again, I got the impression that the point he was making was as important to him as the medium he used to do so. I was certainly impacted by the visuals to consider exactly what I've done to contribute to any or all of the issues he addressed. I think that's the whole point of some art - to make us stop dead in our tracks and see something familiar from a completely new angle, no?