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Nan Tonge sent me photos and a link to ChrisJordan.com which was easily provocative enough for me to want to check out in more depth. I was blown away by his series relating to American consumptionism and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, to name a couple. His macrocosms and microcosms put me in the mind of Godfrey Reggio's Kooyanisquatsi: Life Out of Balance, a 1981 documentary that raised my consciousness about the environment and consumerism. Kooyanisquati is the Hopi term for "Life Out of Balance" and it's relevant as we approach "peak oil." (See the trailer below - this film was ahead of its time - prophetic. The soundtrack is by Philip Glass. It is part of a trilogy.) My son was born in the year it was made, and Nan is his friend. This art represents clearly their politics and they will go on living after we are gone.
The oil barrels and pallets are from the Seattle shipyards, and beneath them are cars, then cell phones and cell phone chargers! With the Barbies, he zooms out and shows such a large amount that they are no longer recognizable as Barbies, but he is showing the number of breast augmentation surgeries done in a year iin the US and the Barbies arranged in bas relief like breasts. The shot that looks like garbage is the remains of a Dollar Store devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
Slugbug
Running the Numbers 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.His 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 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month. (interview at the link)
In April, Chris traveled around the world with National Geographic as their international Eco-ambassador for Earth Day 2008. He exhibited his work, conducted workshops, and gave public lectures and media appearances in Taipei, Lisbon, and Rome.
Salamat para sa mga kagiliw-giliw na blog
Posted by: symnTermter | May 21, 2011 at 05:07 PM
sino ka ba?
Posted by: kayakbiker | May 22, 2011 at 09:46 AM