CF000478, Unaltered Remains of a Laysan Albatross Fledgling, Midway Island
2009 It's Not Easy Being Green
Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan
CF000478, Unaltered Remains of a Laysan Albatross Fledgling, Midway Island
2009 It's Not Easy Being Green
Chris Jordan
Medium:
Photograph
Displayed:
Across the UK and Brazil 7 Oct - 10 Nov
Artwork Description:
On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands in the central Pacific, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place – inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses. Nesting chicks, who are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, mistaking floating trash for food, as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean. These birds reflect an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our consumerism and runaway industrial growth.
Artist's Comment:
For me, kneeling over these carcasses is like looking into a macabre mirror. Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits. Choked to death on our waste, the mythical albatross calls upon us to recognize that our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here.
Bio:
Chris Jordan (b.1963, San Franscisco). For two decades Chris Jordan’s photographs and conceptual artworks have probed into the dark underbelly of our culture of mass consumption. Edge-walking the lines between beauty and horror, abstraction and representation, the near and the far, and the visible and the invisible, his projects have challenged us to look both outward and inward at the complex realities of our collective choices. Jordan’s projects on these themes include Running the Numbers, and his 2018 film Albatross about birds on a remote island in the Pacific whose bodies are filled with plastic. Chris currently lives in a small town in Patagonia, Chile, and in this space of relative isolation his eye turns toward the contemplation of beauty. His new project titled Ecstatic Desolation emphasizes subtlety, stillness, and silence, offering what Chris hopes can serve as a meditative visual container for the mental chaos of our times.
