Chris Jordan - Photography

This new series of work by photographer Chris Jordan 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 tend to 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 a trillion dollars spent on the Iraq war. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed photographic prints assembled from tens-of-thousands of smaller images. The series is still in its early stages, and new images will be posted to Chris' website as they are completed, so please stay tuned.

Below are three views of:

Cans Seurat, 2007
Digital C print, 6x7 feet

Depicting 106,000 aluminum cans, equal to the number of cans consumed in the US every thirty seconds.

The Canary Project & Jon Santos' Dimensions of Change

Over on Emerge, they are talking about fine artist and commercial designer, Jon Santos teaming up with The Canary Project, a photographic project devoted to documenting climate change via powerful landscapes from environmental hotspots around the globe.  Santos has created Dimensions Of Change a series of collaborative images utilizing motifs based on the utopian ideals of folks like Buckminster Fuller, a site specific sculpture and a video piece devoted to the theme of global warming and the issues it causes with water.  The exhibition runs through the end of this week at Crane Arts Building in Philadelphia, where it has been up since September 4. A billboard of the collaboration between Santos and the Canary Project will run in Philadelphia later this Fall to carry the message on once the exhibition is closed.  Creative and compelling, "Dimensions of Change" makes truly moving art out of one of the greatest dilemmas facing humanity in the 21st Century

A Natural Dialogue: Waddy Armstrong & Meghan Gerety

Check out the latest exhibition at Julie Baker Fine Art, paintings, works on paper and photographic cut out collages by Waddy Armstrong and Meghan Gerety.

Waddy Armstrong paints colorful, delicate, painted silhouettes of trees and shrubs. Says Armstrong, "My work explores the connection between science, modern art and the natural world. Inspired by the strange lines and quirky shapes that occur in nature, I take characteristics of various plants and combine them into hybridized semi-abstract compositions."

Juxtaposed with Armstrong's colorful silhouettes are the graphite paintings of New York based artist Meghan Gerety.

The contemplative nature of Meghan Gerety’s work reflects both her practice of Eastern philosophy and her immersion in the history of modern and contemporary painting. The subject of her work is the landscape. Based on photographs, collected from her travels, her landscapes fuse the exploration of inner-self with the gestural energy of action painting. Inspired by vast open spaces and the nature of trees, the work depicts an emotional and spiritual response to the landscape. Enjoy.