Inigo Manglano-Ovalle is another artist that I am very drawn to. Specifically his series Garden of Delights taken in 1998 because they show human characteristics without a face. He calls them portraits, but they’re really photographic samples of DNA that he color codes and enlarges to show that these are what separate people. Not their outward appearance. By making this work, he is getting rid of what people use to judge and classify people… their skin color, gender, age etc. I was obsessed with this because this body of work is so large, in size and quantity and because it’s so awesome that he thought to strip away what we normally view as a portrait and break it down to our DNA. It’s very conceptual and beautiful and colorful and just awesomesauce. Lately he’s been doing a lot of sculptural work that’s beautiful in its own right, but this particular series stands out to me the most.
Chris Jordan is an American artist born in 1963 who produces extremely large photographs based on mass consumption and social concerns with excess waste. He creates his images with digital manipulation to emphasize his concerns for our environment and the way we dispose of our waste. He tries to show this impact through images that are sometimes hard to swallow, or believe. And it’s not his intention for the viewer to “believe” these images. He just wants to artistically show how he feels about this issue. He uses repetition and large-scale work to portray the staggering statistics about what he’s portraying. For example, his Running the Numbers II: Portraits of global mass culture (2009 - Current) they are HUGE images, some familiar like his image of “Starry Night” that depicts 50,000 cigarette lighters, equal to the estimated number of pieces of floating plastic in every square mile in the world's oceans. HOW CRAZY IS THAT? Here is that image, along with a few others of his so you can see how his work can impact so many people.