Gyre

Gyre can be seen in Chris Jordan’s collection Running the Numbers II. This piece of art is a seascape of a thrashing wave that is part of a swirling ocean. In the distance you can see a mountain along with men in boats that are trying to battle this angry being. The curves of the lines are swooping and curvy, with only the tips of the wave having pointy and sharp lines. There seems to be bright objects of trash that is being thrown back in the water, towards these men in the boats. The colors of the trash are much more vivid and bright, compared to the rest of the image’s overall color scheme – which is earthy colors of browns, blues, and greens. The overall image has a textured, gradient look to it, but the waves seem to still have a flowing

This digitally manipulated photograph involves taking pictures of small images and then copying them multiple times to manipulate and form a larger image. Jordan does his own photography for each of his pieces and is intentional about what and where he gets his pieces to photograph. For example, in this piece he collected all of the trash directly from the Pacific Ocean. He then uses statistics and combines the two to create staggering images and concepts to the viewer. In this particular piece, Jordan was inspired and based his art off of Hokusai’s piece, Under the Wave of Kanagawa, which was originally done with woodblock print; which also creates some sort of irony on the ways of Japanese woodblock printing vs digital photography. Woodblock printing involves taking a piece of wood from a tree and carving into it to create an inverted stamp. Hokusai used renewable resources to create his piece whereas Jordan did not. He used nonrenewable sources such as his camera, computer, and energy to run these devices that came from a power plant. Jordan creates his work to speak to people about our unlawful consumption and dependence on unrenewable resources when he uses them himself to create his art, demonstrating first hand, our society’s dependence on non-eco-friendly

Without taking a closer look, you would have never noticed the pictures within the picture; furthermore his purpose, reason, or argument about this piece. Detail is essential in proving and communicating his point. Along with finite details, he uses captions at the bottom of his pieces that involve statistics to start and prove his point. These facts combined with his images create for an effective argument because they allow people to understand these shocking statistics and let them be able to wrap their minds around the depths that they propose as well. In Gyre, the caption reads:

Depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enters the world’s oceans every hour. All of the plastic in this image was collected from the Pacific Ocean.

If it isn’t shocking enough he collected 2.4 million pieces, it was all from the Pacific Ocean. It is hard to imagine such a thing when you read it, but you can actually visualize it when looking at this image – something so beautiful yet so