Number crunch

Chris Jordan’s photographic works have punchlines—they’re just not that funny.

From afar, a pixilated image looks just like Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” But move closer, and each little dot turns out to be a soda or beer can. The piece’s title: “Cans Seurat.” A description beside it relays that it represents the 106,000 aluminum cans used in the United States every 30 seconds. A nation of guzzlers, tossing back empty calories to fill increasingly crowded landfills.

The piece is part of Running the Numbers, an exhibit by the Seattle-based artist, on display at the Nevada Museum of Art through July 17.

Jordan photographs a mass of objects—a few hundred plastic bottles, oil barrels, paper bags and other waste symbols. Then he multiplies them digitally over and over, sometimes arranging them to form an image like Seurat’s painting, sometimes not, in order to bring otherwise colorless statistics vividly to life.

One piece looks light and wispy from afar, like dandelion seeds blowing over a blue sky. Step closer and each wisp becomes a jet trail—11,000 of them to equal the number of commercial jet flights in the U.S. every eight hours. In the same vein are works depicting the 100 million trees cut each year to make junk mail; the 28,000, 42-gallon barrels of oil the country burns through every two minutes; the 2 million plastic beverage bottles used in the U.S. every five minutes, and the 426,000 cell phones discarded in the United States every day. Particularly disheartening is that these images represent only U.S. consumption data—global waste is far greater.

Jordan has said the images attempt to make overwhelming statistics gathered largely from government databases more comprehensible. In some ways, seeing them visually is more overwhelming, yet more real.

Jordan doesn’t stop at images commonly related to environmental waste. Reddish brown slabs that look like paper bags or sliced deli ham turn out to be 2.3 million folded prison uniforms—the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005. A large, densely black canvas is composed of 29,569 handguns, one for every U.S. gun-related death in 2004. And a money-hued image of Ben Franklin depicts the $12.5 million the United States spent every hour on the war in Iraq. With these images, Jordan connects environmental and social waste, showing they are inextricably tied.

This exhibit can make a person feel small, like one of the millions of dots on the canvas. Viewers may be inspired to use reusable mugs rather than disposable bottles, canvas bags rather than paper or plastic, or even take fewer flights. But the individual often feels powerless in the face of war or the social conditions that create prisoners and keep them in jail. On the other hand, one could also imagine a collection of millions of pixilated individuals, each trying to live more sustainably at the same time. That’s a powerful image, as well.