Beauty with Backlash - Environmental Appropriation Art

While studying appropriation art in class, we looked at the brilliant and intricate works of the artist Chris Jordan.  His re-creations of such familiar and beloved works as Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Seurat's Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte with pieces of collected trash strive to point out the waste and consumption inherent in modern society.  In the assignment that has me blogging today, we were asked to find a work of appropriation art on the same theme which we are using to create our own first work in the class.  Given that my theme is humanity's impact on the environment, I naturally gravitated back toward the work of Chris Jordan.

Above is Chris Jordan's Denali Denial (2006), a piece constructed with 24,000 logos from the GMC Yukon Denali.  Jordan's website states that the number of logos in the painting was equal to the numbers of said SUVs sold every six weeks in the year 2004.  However, rather than showing a landscape negatively impacted by gas-guzzling vehicles, Jordan chose to imitate a photograph of a beautiful mountain lake. 

This is a strategy Jordan used in many of the works in his two Running the Numbers series.  The function this technique serves above is to make one keenly aware of what is at stake in our consumer-driven culture.  What would happen if everyone started driving all over the scene above in their SUVs?  And what about the oil needed to make the gasoline for those vehicles?  What impact has and will the oil industry have on the beautiful landscape above?  I want my piece to have a similar message.  Comparing a beautiful lake landscape of today with a semi-nightmarish landscape choked by smokestacks and dark, looming factories will allow me to point out something important: what we have lost, and what we still stand to lose if society as a whole does not pay more attention to the environment.

-Kelly F.