Cigarettes for a lifetime, circuit boards for everyone in your family, bullets for some target practice and a mountain of sawdust to suck up oil spilt barrels.  Admittedly, Chris Jordan has been told of comments coming from people saying their daughter could make the portraits that he has created using Photoshop.

Below: Lung Static

It may be true that people with knowledge of Photoshop and enough time could create these depictions, but that seems to be true of any art; it always takes a certain skill, tedious work and a great idea.  Chris states:

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.

Not every kid is going to hop fences in industrial areas and recycling transfer stations to get the necessary shots for the idea.

I went to see his current exhibition at Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History which was laden with statistics of 106,000 aluminum cans used every 30 seconds in the US to depict a Monet painting.  Unfortunately photographs were forbidden and I could only upload some (blurry) iphone pics to twitter.  His 32 thousand Barbie dolls forming breasts and defining the number of breast augmentations held each month was both modest and beautiful at the same time.

Circuit Boards

Sawdust Mountains or…

… Oil barrels polk-a-dotting your camera lens.

–his works become a representation of who we are as consumers.

Via Chris Jordan

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