At first you walk by and you think, “Oh look! There’s a Hokusai,” –
it looks a bit out of place at the entrance to the Tabakfabrik
or probably at any of the exhibitions here in Linz.
…but then, you get right up on it and look deep down into it and you see…TRASH –
plastic, to be precise – and now you understand completely because this is a picture of mass culture.
You begin to realize that you almost walked right by this in the same way that
you might walk past a discarded plastic bottle that once held “spring” water.
It’s a zooming in from the collective mass to the individual modern icon from yestermorning.
This work, Gyre, from Chris Jordan, depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic,
equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour.
All of the plastic in this image was collected from the Pacific Ocean.
It’s part of the second in a series known as Running the Numbers.
