Picture of the Day: from Chris Jordan February 11, 2008
Posted by ~V~ in : Images, Picture of the Day , add a commentbecause an image speaks volumes in an instant.
Cans Seurat by Chris Jordan | 60″ x 92″
Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number
used in the US every thirty seconds.
Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait
This series 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…
Cans Seurat, partial zoom
This project visually examines these vast and bizarre
measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints
assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.
The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the
individual in a society that is increasingly enormous,
incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
Cans Seurat, detail
My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so…
‘Un dimanche après-midi
à l’ÃŽle de la Grande Jatte’
or
‘A Sunday Afternoon on the
Island of La Grande Jatte’
by Georges-Pierre Seurat
