Take a look at that empty soft drink bottle in your trash? Is it art? Most of us would be inclined to reply “no.” Well mulitply that one bottle by two million. How about now? Seattle artist, Chris Jordan, is taking a look at the numbers in his new series, Running Numbers, An American Self-Portrait. In this series of photographs, Jordan puts our American lifestyle under the microscope. He shows us through a snap shot in time, just how much waste we continuously create. Seen from a far, his pieces look abstract. Take a closer look, and the statistics he’s illustrating are horrifying. See “Plastic Bottles” below to get a feel for it (click on the images to see a larger version) .   This piece depicts two million empty plastic bottles, the number used every five minutes in the United States. Far from desolate and hopeless, though, Jordan’s intention is to present (in his own words) “images representing these quantities” so that they “might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.” This certainly is a call to action on our part. We can all help to change the statistics.