Photographer focuses on numbers, waste

The Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College will present "Running the Numbers: Photographs by Chris Jordan." The exhibit will be on view in the museum's Ellen Johnson Gallery from March 11-June 8, 2008.

Jordan's photos investigate contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. The themes of environmental stewardship, mass consumption, waste, public health and social justice are explored through Jordan's haunting, large-scale images. The works confront viewers with the often overwhelming numbers that are the sum of individual habits.

Each photo in this series, subtitled "An American Self-Portrait," depicts a specific quantity of a particular item: 15 million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 426,000 cell phones (the number retired every day); 106,000 aluminum cans (30 seconds of consumption).

These vast photographs, assembled from thousands of smaller ones, cause viewers to examine their roles as members of a consumer society. One example, "Plastic Bottles," is a 60"x120" digital print of two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the United States every five minutes.

Jordan finds inspiration for his photos from such diverse sources as Van Gogh, Georges Seurat and Ansel Adams, as well as the late 20th-century art movements of systems art, minimalism and op art.

"Running the Numbers" is Jordan's first solo museum exhibition and is organized by Andria Derstine, curator of Western Art at the AMAM.

On Wednesday, March 12, Jordan will present a lecture on his work in the Ellen Johnson Gallery, with a reception to follow. The talk begins at 5 p.m. and is free and open to the public.