CHRIS JORDAN - Running the Numbers II: Portraits of global mass culture

This morning I found a link via twitter to the recent work from Chris Jordan on Seeds. If you're not familiar with his work visit his website here.

Chris Jordan

The art work I wish to show you is titled:

Proposed New Corporate Logo For Monsanto Company, 2011 4x9 feet, based on a 

painting by Josiah Lopez  Depicts 200,000 heirloom agricultural plant seeds, equal to the 

number of farmers in India who have committed suicide since 1997, when Monsanto 

introduced its genetically modified cotton seeds containing terminator technology into that 

region.

* SEE IMAGE HERE  -  Its way too large to download and has a brilliant facility that enlarges 

the work for viewing up close so you can see every seed. Well worth a visit!

From the website  of the publisher of Chris Jordans' books - read here.

Part one of the series.

Statistics can be daunting but dry: 100 million trees cut down every year to make the paper for junk mail; 380,000 kilowatt hours of electricity wasted every minute; 2 million plastic bottles used every five minutes; 2.3 million Americans incarcerated in U.S. prisons in a single year. Renowned photographer Chris Jordan brings these staggering numbers to life in manipulated digital photographs that are at once alluring and shocking. A landscape of toothpicks, each representing a felled tree, stretches into the horizon; a looping maze of plastic cups reveals how many are used every six hours on airplane flights; and a replica of a Seurat masterpiece fashioned from aluminum cans becomes a lesson in waste. These astonishing photographs of great beauty reveal the devastating consequences of our culture of consumption.

As Paul Hawken notes, Jordan’s images are “a supplication to all who look upon them, to harm no more, to be mindful in all that we do, speak, and take."

A Seurat painting created from many small pictures of aluminum cans. The picture is composed of 106,000 cans, which is what the U.S. uses in 30 seconds (yikes). This is a 70x100 foot wall. Chris quipped that it's particularly sad as the contents of these are mostly sugared water and piss-poor beer.

From Treehugger