by Claudia Chan | Did you know that 20,500 tuna are fished out of the sea every 15 minutes? Or that two million beverage bottles are used in the States every five minutes? 50 000 plastic cigarette lighters float in every square mile of the world’s oceans and 92,500 (one hundredth of one percent) of the world’s population suffer from malnutrition. What does one do with such large and appalling numbers?

Chris Jordan for one, makes art. Chris is a Seattle-based artist who borrows an astounding statistic about mass culture and consumption and conveys its magnitude through various large-scale, long-zoom art pieces. By quantifying statistics through imagery, Chris helps us imagine the immensity of consumerist behaviours which are often described by numbers that we can hardly grasp.

In this piece called Tuna, he’s taken multiple photos of tuna and digitally stitched 20,500 tuna together on canvas to portray the global problem of overfishing. This is one of his many pieces that belong to his collection entitled Running the Numbers: An American Self Portrait. Through his work, Chris Jordan compels people to think differently about their spending and consuming habits. While the scale of these environmental problems may seem disheartening and nearly impossible to change, he emphasizes that it is our individual choice to either ignore them or to acknowledge them. We each hold the power to consume in ways that would be a little less harmful, a little gentler and a little healthier for the planet.

We can start small; choose canvas bags over plastic, water bottles over plastic bottles, eat more veggies than fish and meat (better for you anyways), shop vintage, buy used things off Craigslist, walk, bike or transit to work and turn off the lights when you’re done with them. If we all made such changes in our daily lives, then cumulatively the numbers would be less daunting and we would be a whole lot better at putting sustainability into practice.

The piece Tuna (2009) is currently exhibiting at Winsor Gallery on South Granville. The gallery is open for viewing from Monday to Saturday from 10AM to 6PM. For more on the artist, visit chrisjordan.com.

EVERYTHING SEEN IN VANCOUVER

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Claudia Chan is an advocate of all things green. Born and raised in Vancouver, she is inspired by the work of local urban farmers, eco artists and policy makers who make this city the most lush and livable to work and play in. Her mission with Scout and her “Greenlight” column is to impart her enthusiasm for bike lanes, community gardens, farmers’ markets and more to her fellow Vancouverites.