Chris Jordan: Midway

Chris Jordan’s photographs depict the magnitude of our consumerism and its impact on our environment. His work sends a bold message about unconscious behaviors in our everyday lives, providing a platform for rich conversation and education around issues of ocean health, ecosystem interconnectedness, mass consumption and plastic consumption. The exhibition will present a number of photographs featuring his body of work entitled Midway: Message from the Gyre. 

On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of countless dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean. His feature length film about this subject will also be shown as part of the public programming for this exhibition. 

This exhibition will also be the public debut of Jordan’s newest photographic series Olympic, in which he uses high-resolution digital photography to convey the vast sublime of the world’s oceans. With these images juxtaposed with his Midway prints, it reinforces the idea that society’s waste problems can affect an ecosystem so far removed from where we live.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website