Flex Credit--Chris Jordan

            During the Chris Jordan’s exhibition, I went to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum three times to watch his show. Before I visited his exhibition I never heard him before (please forgive my shallow~~), thereby, I searched his information online to help me to beginning knowing about him.

            Chris Jordan is an artist based in Seattle, Washington who is best known for his large scale works depicting mass consumption and waste, particularly garbage. He has been called "the 'it' artist of the green movement". With these preliminary understanding, I visited his exhibition at first time. Like most art exhibition, the entire layout of Chris Jordan’s art exhibition is simple and clean, the only difference is that the light in here is darker and softer than other exhibitions. And then I found the sign which write that: 75% energy saving, that’s how much the JSMA is projected to save   traditional halogen lighting.’ Applying the environmental protection concept to the subtle details, which is the first highlight I found in Jordan’s exhibition. I watched every pieces and comments in this exhibition carefully, when I stared every work, I tried my best to reached a realm that not only just looking, but also to understand the author’s soul.

            Among Chris Jordan’s work, there are some pieces left a deep impression on me.

The first one is named ‘Light Bulbs’, the note is that ‘Depicts 320,000 light bulbs, equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage’. Jordan’s work is a frightening wake-up call that is based on waste, consumerism, planned obsolescence and the ravages to our environment.The work consists of large, detailed prints put together by using thousands of tiny photographs. The importance of the individual among the collective is made visually clear, and the sheer overwhelming nature of these problems cannot be escaped.

The other piece ‘Barbie Dolls’ which attracted me deeply, I think almost every girl liked Barbie Dolls in their childhood, thereby, I can grasp that feeling quickly. At the beginning, I was just attracted by the millions of pretty Barbie dolls, the orange background and countless Barbie dolls were composed of the numerous flowers, everything in this piece looked normal and good. But when I read the note and went home to search it on the internet, I found it was talking about ‘the number of electric breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the United Stated’. These plastic, large breasted, out of proportion dolls create unrealistic images in children's minds of a woman's body. Yet media advertising, television and Hollywood would reinforce her message, influencing what would become the American ideal of beauty. With more and more women pursuing the beauty, Chris Jordan made his own comments about this phenomenon in his work, which is how this doll has affected American women’s body images.

At second times, when I watched again his exhibition. I found the joint point among these 20 pieces—every piece is composed by the same small elements which constitute the overall theme. Let’s move our topic here to a wider theme, it can be given an example that-- ‘Skull With Cigarette’, which is an interesting piece in his exhibition. This skull gave me a fashion sense when I looked from a distance, it looks like the posters of Alexander Mcqueen~~But when I walked nearer the wall, I found an interesting thing that the whole skull is made up by millions of cigarette brands, like Winston, American Spirit and etc.—they all are the common brands. Chris Jordan wanted to approve that 200,000 packs of cigarettes equal to the number of Americans who die from cigarette smoking every six months. Among his 20 works in this show, at first glance, they all are the ordinary pictures, but when you enlarge these pictures, you will see this figure is made up of thousands of airplanes, dollar bills, barrels, beverage bottles and etc. Chris Jordan used daily necessities to wake up the public’s environmental awareness and want to visualize the massive consumption products in our daily life. It’s worth mentioning that each image depicts a specific amount: 1.5 billion Office paper (amount of paper used every five minutes), 106,000 aluminum cans (aluminum can consumption of every 30 seconds). Chris Jordan hopes will bring the number of these images represent the original data more intense shock effect, because we see the raw data is abstracted in the newspaper every day and make us numb, it is difficult to think of statistical data on the true meaning of our lives.

When I came to the Museum at third time, I sit down quietly, listening to the introduction on the phone and tasting the spirit he would bring to us. This exhibition through the intricate visual to look at our huge and strange society, Chris Jordan used the comparison of far and near, more and less to explain everything. When I looked again these pictures, I can’t help but think of some questions: how consumerism leads to waste and ecological destruction, how deadly habits like smoking really are, how an idealized body image drives the plastic surgery industry and in an increasingly large, strongly changing society, what is our role and responsibilities? When I was deeply impacted by these ideas, I don’t know how to answer these questions in-depth thought, maybe we should drink less beverage, save paper in every time, reduce the frequency of travelling by plane and do not pursue trend to change new style phones often. From the small details in our daily life, starting to change bit by bit, enhancing our environmental awareness and correcting the incorrect behavior. After this exhibition, I have to say that Chris Jordan used special to describe the phenomenon of American consumerism, we really should pay more attention about this.

This i s one of Chris Jordan's famous work.

On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean.