A great website: US culture in statistics and art

This is a great website that makes you think - Chris Jordan's Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait - see here.

Seattle-based Chris has kindly let the Gloucestershire Green party use his work in the past to illustrate our news releases - see here on Katrina and waste. He writes of this latest work:

"This new 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. 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 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

"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. The series is still in its early stages, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned."

I think this work is a great way to get a message across about consumerism and waste and more - wish I could see the exhibition itself - anyone out there want to bring it to the UK? I've emailed Chris to see if he might even be interested in a UK version - sadly not in a position to fund it though...any blog readers interested??