Wk 9 - Artist - Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan

About the Artist

Chris Jordan (1963 - present) is a Seattle based contemporary artist who's work is described as 'edge-walking the lines between art and activism, beauty and horror, abstraction and representation, the near and the far, the visible and the invisible...'. Predominatly focused on contemporary mass consumerism and culture, as well as sustainability, in both the United States and internationally, Jordan seeks to create an avenue for connection between the context of his pieces and the viewer, allowing for audiences to recognize not only the enormity of the range of issues prevalent on our planet, but also the collective power of humanity, and the responsibility we have as stewards to all social and environmental distinctions around us.

Analysis

With his powerful images of mass consumption, Chris Jordan issues a clear directive to mankind: it is time to sweat the small stuff. In isolation, individual purchases of electronics, single-serving foods, and plastic amenities do not trigger visions of an environmental emergency. But as the human population approaches eight billion, the amplification of every small act of consumption translates into the rapid and pervasive degradation of the natural world. In a body of work entitled Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption, Jordan visited landfills and recycling centers to photograph vast piles of discarded products such as cell phones, chargers, circuit boards, crushed cars, glass bottles and other consumer goods. Jordan transformed these billowing piles into seductive abstractions, whose beauty is at odds with the reality that discarded items consume resources in the recycling process and propel a stream of residual waste into landfills, wastewater plants and the atmosphere.

Cell phone chargers, Atlanta, 2004

Chris Jordan, 2004, archival inkjet print, 44″ x 66″, © 2004, courtesy of the artist

Circuit boards, Atlanta, 2004

Chris Jordan, 2004, archival inkjet print, 44″ x 64″, © 2005, courtesy of the artist

In a related body of work entitled Running the Numbers, Jordan translates consumption and waste statistics into composited images that visually connect the data to its environmental impact. Part of Chris Jordan’s Running the Numbers series, this image depicts 260,000 car keys, equal to the number of gallons of gasoline burned in motor vehicles in the United States every minute (as of 2011). The internal combustion engines that power most cars have a substantial carbon footprint, but the growth of electric vehicles offers bright hope for the future. Many experts believe that improvements in battery technology will lead to tremendous growth in electric vehicles. Learn more about emerging battery technologies and what it will take for those technologies to move beyond the hype stage of development. How quickly will consumers transition to electric vehicles and what will be the implications for oil?

Car Keys, 2011

Chris Jordan, 2011, archival inkjet print, 60″ x 86″, © 2011, courtesy of the artist

Whale is constructed from images of 50,000 plastic bags, equal to the estimated number of pieces of floating plastic in every square mile in the world’s oceans. Chris Jordan explains his intention in transforming data into art: “Each of us attempts to build this new kind of worldview. . . of the interconnection of things: the environmental footprints 1,000 miles away of the things that we buy; the social consequences 10,000 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: numbers in the millions, in the hundreds of millions, in the billions and now in the trillions. . . . these are numbers that our brain 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 to translate them into a more universal visual language, that can be felt. Because my belief is, 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?”

Whale, 2011 (based on a photograph by Bryant Austin)

Chris Jordan, 2011, archival inkjet print, 44″ x 82″, © 2011, courtesy of the artist

While these works highlight the scale of consumer waste production, it is the haunting images of Jordan’s Midway and Camel Gastrolith projects that draw our attention to the innocent victims of our excess. We see the carcass of a baby albatross, its gut filled with plastic caps, lighters and other lethal plastic objects. We see the stomach contents of a dead camel, comprised of over 500 plastic bags, along with plastic, glass and metal debris. Throughout his work, Jordan reveals the harrowing consequences of our daily choices and the urgent need to make a change.

Unaltered stomach contents of a Laysan albatross fledgling, Midway Island, 2009

Chris Jordan, 2009, archival inkjet print, 26″ x 32″, © 2009, courtesy of the artist

Camel Gastrolith

Chris Jordan, 2016, high-resolution video, © 2016, courtesy of the artist, video: Ian Gilman

In the words of the artist: “Exploring around our country’s shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress. I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity. The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits. As an American consumer myself, I am in no position to finger wag; but I do know that when we reflect on a difficult question in the absence of an answer, our attention can turn inward, and in that space may exist the possibility of some evolution of thought or action. So my hope is that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry. It may not be the most comfortable terrain, but I have heard it said that in risking self-awareness, at least we know that we are awake.”