Chris Jordan
Relevancy:
Chris Jordan works with consumerism and wants to positively influence people to change as a society. He doesn’t want to point the finger at people so much for being at fault but point the finger at the problem and help solve it. He feels his role is to make factual statistics often enormous numbers into a visual language that people can understand and relate to. His large prints have a wow effect and shock the viewers’ moral system, something I attempt to do with my work. He titled one of his books “Running The Numbers I: An American Self Portrait” I feel that he is critiquing himself, something I want to do in my work while still showing my viewers that they are a part of what I present. Chris works with statistical data, something that I often incorporate into my work. I feel that the data adds substance to the work even if the viewer doesn’t understand the work that goes into making my images. Chris exploits the statics to a point that they are unavoidable. His method of showing numbers made me think if I need to be more upfront with my statistics in a manner that is more relatable to my viewers. When I state statics for example 90,000 people die each year from alcohol, I am now unsure if people really register how many people 90,000 is. I feel most connected to his work that is comprised of multiple images but I am also very impressed with his body of work titled “Midway” where he documents the death of birds from eating plastic. I think looking and listening to Chris and his work will make me more effective in reaching my audience and critiquing myself.
About:
“Many of Jordan's works are created from photographs of garbage, a serendipitous technique which started when he visited an industrial yard to look at patterns of color and order. His industrious passion for conservation and awareness has brought much attention to his photography in recent years. Jordan uses everyday commonalities such as a plastic cup and defines the blind unawareness involved in American consumerism. His work, while often unsettling, is a bold message about unconscious behaviors in our everyday lives, leaving it to the viewer to draw conclusions about the inevitable consequences which will arise from our habits.”
“The best of art is about something bigger than aestheticism, something that reflects on culture and makes a social statement that moves people. The work of artist Chris Jordan does just that. It grabs culture by its most unsettling truths, then displays them in gripping visuals that are part data, part philosophy, part brilliant photographic art.
Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, Jordan’s latest project, exposes those hidden layers of consumerism, the big truths we give little thought to, by putting the devastating scale of our cultural excess into perspective. A visualization of statistical data, the project attempts to bring a human perspective to the alienating world of numbers.
Each statistically accurate image is a collage of miniature photographs portraying a specific excess: The 15 million sheets of office paper we use every 5 minutes, the 106,000 aluminum cans we chug every 30 seconds, the 3.6 million SUV’s we buy every year, the 2.3 million Americans in prison, and so forth.”
Popova, Maria “Artist Spotlight: Chris Jordan” Brain Pickings, Oct 2008: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2008/10/29/artist-spotlight-chris-jordan/
Interviews/ Quotes:
“The reason that I do this it’s because I have this fear that we aren’t feeling enough as a culture right now. There’s this kind of anesthesia in America at the moment. We’ve lost our sense of outrage, our anger and our grief about what’s going on in our culture right now what’s going on in our country, the atrocities that our being committed in our names around the world. They’ve gone missing. These feelings have gone missing. Our cultural joy our national joy is nowhere to be seen and one of the causes of this I think is that as each of us attempts to build this new kind of world view this whole optical world view, holographic image that we are all trying to create in our mind of the interconnection of things, the environmental footprints a thousand miles away from the things that we buy or the social consequences ten-thousand miles away of the daily decisions that we make as consumers. As we try to build this view and try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture. The information that we have to work with is these gigantic numbers things and numbers in the millions, billions and now in the trillions. Bush’s new budget in the trillions. And these are numbers that our brains just doesn’t have the ability to comprehend. We can’t make meaning out of these enormous statistics. And so that’s what I’m trying to do with my work is to take these numbers these statistics from the raw language of data and translate them into the more universal visual language that can be felt. Because my belief is that if we can feel these issues, if we can feel these things more deeply then they’ll matter to us more than they do now. And if we can find that then we’ll be able to find within each one of us what it is that we need to find to face the big question, which is how do we change. That to me is the big question that we face as a people right now.” – Chris Jordan
Ted Talk Monterey CA Feb 2008
“You are taking ordinary objects and recycling them into art, creating something beautiful at first glance, whose message kicks in later. Have visitors to your exhibitions commented on this “oh” effect?” – Simone Preuss
“It’s fun for me to go to exhibitions because there’s a double layer to my work. Seen from a distance, the images are like something else, maybe totally boring pieces of modern art. On closer view, the visitor has an almost unpleasant experience with the artwork. It’s almost a magic trick; inviting people to a conversation that they didn’t want to have in the first place. One visitor recently compared me to a “sleight-of-hands-magician” that makes people face up to a difficult truth, I quite liked that.” – Chris Jordan
“Your new book, “Running the Numbers” [Prestel Publishing, 2009] is subtitled “An American Self-Portrait” – are you looking critically at yourself too?” – Simone Preuss
“Yes, the subtitle is meant self-reflectively in a collective and individual sense. A lot of my criticism comes from looking at the consumerism in my own life. Like many viewers of my art, I am also torn because one part of me wants to stay in denial, doesn’t want to know about my role in this environment; on the other hand, I want to know and participate; I want to fully live and do my part as well. As an artist, I want to draw people gently into this conversation by raising the right questions.” – Chris Jordan
Preuss, Simone “An Interview with Photographic Artist Chris Jordan” Environmental Graffiti:
“The problem is this cumulative effect from the behaviors of hundreds of millions of individuals,” said Jordan. His art calls on each person to make changes in their own actions, rather than finger-pointing or aggrandizing the problem to society as a whole. “There is no public out there who needs to change. That’s kind of the underlying message that I’m trying to convey. It’s each one of us.” – Chris Jordan
Huston, Thomas “Imagining the Unimaginable Seattle artist portrays the scale of consumerism” The Garfield Messenger, May 2008: http://www.garfieldmessenger.com/arts/2008/05/02/imagining-the-unimaginable/
Images/Videos:
Video about his series Midway:
Artist Website:
Artist Representation:
Self
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