Paper Bags, 2007
60x80"
Depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour.
Running the Numbers
An American Self-Portrait
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. My 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.
...I hope to raise some questions about the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
~chris jordan
Fascinating and awe-inspiring... and somewhat sickening.
More at http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7
