HALSEY INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
ARTIST INTERVIEW | CHRIS JORDAN
“Bryan Granger (BG): How did you get interested in our problematic relationship with plastic?
Chris Jordan (CJ): The dark underbelly of our culture of mass consumption has fascinated me for many years, and when journeying into that territory, one can’t help but come up against plastic. It is such an iconic material, symbolic of the insanity of the human world: we know of its multileveled toxicity, and yet we use it to contain our food. It is made to last forever, yet we form it into things that are meant to be thrown away after a single use. And plastic has a kind of sterile perfection to it that I think makes us unconsciously seek it out as a way of avoiding the messy reality of life. Millions of people prefer to drink water from a clear plastic bottle than from a cup filled at a tap, even knowing that the tap water is cleaner, and even if the bottled water costs 2,000 times more. Maybe it is not too much to suggest that in one way, plastic serves as a kind of unconscious manifestation of our fear of death…”