Never say numbers are boring. Ballard-based photographic artist Chris Jordan takes baffling statistics on American culture—400,000 smoking-related deaths a year, 2.3 million people incarcerated in 2005, 32,000 breast augmentations performed in 2006, many as high school graduation gifts—and translates them into visceral, eco-conscious artwork in Running the Numbers, at the Pacific Science Center through January 3. Seattle Met talked to Jordan about America’s love affair with consumption and the connection between Georges-Pierre Seurat and soda cans.

How do you decide which statistics to illustrate?

CJ: I’ll be reading the news or The New York Times and I’ll come across a shocking statistic, and I realize that I need to do something about that. The issues I like to focus on are complex and are those in which we are all implicated.

You’ve said you’re interested in collective unconscious behaviors, and that Americans have lost the ability to feel. Can you talk more about that?

CJ: Not feeling is a very American phenomenon. We don’t have the same amount of emotional processing that other cultures do. We think we’re supposed to be happy all the time. And this is compounded by modernization: The only information we have available to us comes in the form of dry, unfeeling statistics. If we could go see a mountain of plastic waste, we would have an emotional response.

Part of the exhibit is from an earlier collection of your work called “Intolerable Beauty.” Can you talk more about the seductive nature—the allure—of mass consumption?

CJ: At first glance, the luxurious style of life and mass consumption of America looks good, but when you zoom in close—on the number of suicides among professionals, the longer hours Americans work than any other country, the amount of antidepressants and high rates of drug and alcohol abuse—all these are the symptoms of an unhappy people. My own view is that these are caused by our obsessive focus on wealth.

One of your most popular pieces is Cans Seurat, a look-a-like of Seurat’s famous Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte that’s actually a composite of 106,000 aluminum cans—the total used in the U.S. every 30 seconds. What’s the connection between Seurat’s painting and soda cans?

CJ: I wanted to do a modern pointillist piece, and this was perfect because it’s a snapshot of what it looked like for people to take their leisure in the park at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, before taking leisure in a park involved so much stuff. Nowadays it would involve a parking lot filled with SUVs, footballs and Frisbees, napkins and plates and coolers… [But back then] almost no stuff was involved, just a group of people just being.

Would you consider yourself an artist first, or an activist?

CJ: I try to walk the line and not stray too far from either one. I dislike old-style activism because its too finger-waggy—it fails to appreciate complexity. I don’t want to come up with answers; I’m just interested in raising the issue in a way that is non-confrontational and non-judgmental, that will bring the viewer to self-inquiry.

So what’s up next?
CJ: I just finished a photography collection called Midway on the albatross dying from pollution on Midway (in the North Pacific islands). Now I’m working on publishing a book … and I’m also working on a documentary film on the Midway experience.