art on report

The most recent artist to visit us here at WSU was a Seattle photographer named Chris Jordan. There is an entire show of his work in our museum right now, but as usual, I came to appreciate it a great deal more after hearing him speak about it. At first I thought he just did some work on the computer to achieve the mass amount of objects that can be seen in his Running the Numbers series. That's partially true, he does use the computer, but he also sets up piles of things (such as discarded cell phones) and photographs them over and over, then combines the images to create an unbelievable amount. His main agenda is to communicate the crazy, unimaginable amount of waste that we as Americans produce. Everything is based on statistics of course, but it definitely makes you think. As it so happens, he was a guest on the Colbert Report a couple years ago, and you can watch the clip here.