Chris Jordan: Running the Numbers

The second annual Art/Act Exhibition

September 13, 2010 – January 7, 2011
September 30, 2010 / Reception and Opening Celebration
In the Hazel Wolf Gallery

In Chris Jordan’s series Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, begun in 2005, Jordan envisions staggering statistics of American consumption. Two million bottles are depicted in a larger-than-human-scale digital photograph entitled Plastic Bottles, 2007, literally representing the number of plastic beverage bottles used in the United States every five minutes. In Oil Barrels, 2008, 28,000 barrels are presented in a mandala-like formation of concentric circles, recalling the volume of oil burned in the United States every two minutes. 

From a distance, many of Jordan’s images appear as reductive color fields, minimal landscapes or geometric patterns, while others coalesce into recognizable imagery such as a school of fish in Tuna, 2009, Hokusai’s famous woodcut image of a wave in Gyre, 2009 and a pair of sharks in Shark Teeth, 2008. Up close, however, it becomes clear that these images are enormous composites of thousands of individual objects. Jordan masterfully stitches together hundreds or thousands of photographs using digital technology to create each seamless composition. Accompanying captions reveal the disturbing statistics on which the images are based. With these aesthetically seductive, spectacularly large photographs, Jordan reminds us that our individual lifestyles contribute to a shockingly great cumulative impact on the planet. While the artist admits he himself is not outside the consumption habits of most Americans, he hopes “that these photographs can serve as portals to a kind of cultural self-inquiry” that is necessary for us to even consider what to do next.

About the Artist

Chris Jordan’s work has garnered an impressive amount of recognition in the time since he left the law profession by resigning from the bar to focus on making art in 2003.  Since then, he has exhibited in museums and galleries in at least 20 states and eight countries. Perhaps more significant, though, is his exposure via the Internet. His website receives over 75,000 individual visitors per month, and through the viral popularity of his work he has been invited to appear on television shows such as Bill Moyers Journal, The Colbert Report and the Rachel Ray Show. Several books of Jordan’s photographs have been published, including Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster and Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption.

About the Annual Art/Act Exhibition

The David Brower Center believes that art can have unique transformative power, especially when placed in the service of activism. As art critic Lucy Lippard says, such art “cares about, challenges, involves, and consults the audience for whom it is made, respecting community and environment ... and is engaged with its audience in articulating a differently understood past, an alternate present, or a set of possible futures.” The annual Art/Act Exhibition honors work that achieves such a convergence of art and activism.

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