Beginning May 27, we will be closed as part of Oberlin College’s Sustainable Infrastructure Program.
Closed Summer 2024
Beginning May 27, we will be closed as part of Oberlin College’s Sustainable Infrastructure Program.
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Learn MoreMarch 11 - June 15, 2008
In Ellen Johnson Gallery
March 11 - June 15, 2008
In Ellen Johnson Gallery
Chris Jordan's photographs 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 haunting, large-scale images, which cause the viewer to directly confront numbers through a visual medium.
Each work portrays 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 second of consumption). As Jordan plays with size and scale in these vast photographs, assembled from thousands of smaller ones, he also causes us to examine our role, responses, opinions and actions as members of a consumer society and as inhabitants of both a man-made and natural world. Images representing the quantities involved have a different and more powerful lasting effect than the raw numbers alone, which can often be mind-numbing and feel remote from daily life.
Jordan has stated, "Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing... this project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society. My underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible and overwhelming."
Organized by Andria Derstine, curator of Western art.
Curator of Western Art
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