‘RUNNING THE NUMBERS’ WILL OPEN AT OBERLIN’S ALLEN MUSEUM MARCH 11

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OBERLIN, OHIO — The Allen Memorial Art Museum will present the exhibition, “Running the Numbers: Photographs by Chris Jordan,” on view March 11–June 8 in the Ellen Johnson Gallery.

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 seconds of consumption).

Jordan’s vast photographs, assembled from thousands of smaller ones, cause us to examine our roles and responses 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; 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.”

The Allen Memorial Art Museum is at 87 North Main Street. For more information, www.oberlin.edu/amam or 440-775-8665.