SEA CHANGE

Co-presented by the South Carolina Aquarium

SEA CHANGE is a series of exhibitions and programs presented in collaboration with the South Carolina Aquarium to raise awareness of our enormous plastic waste problem and the detrimental effects on our planet. SEA CHANGE features the exhibitions Aurora Robson: The Tide is High and Chris Jordan: Midway at the Halsey Institute. Jordan’s breathtaking imagery helps us recognize the monumental effects of plastic waste on distant ecosystems, and Robson’s work provides strategies towards intercepting the waste stream and upcycling discarded plastics into new objects. Aurora Robson will also have a piece exhibited at the South Carolina Aquarium.

Along with their respective exhibitions, Robson and Jordan will be giving public lectures about their work and Jordan’s film ALBATROSS will premiere at the Charleston Music Hall. Robson will also work with College of Charleston students on a project to reclaim materials from a local beach clean-up that will be used to create works of art. With SEA CHANGE, we hope to engage Charleston and the Lowcountry in actively recognizing and mitigating our enormous plastic waste problem.

CHRIS JORDAN: MIDWAY 

Chris Jordan’s photographs depict the magnitude of our consumerism and its impact on our environment. His work sends a bold message about unconscious behaviors in our everyday lives, providing a platform for rich conversation and education around issues of ocean health, ecosystem interconnectedness, mass consumption and plastic consumption. The exhibition will present a number of photographs featuring his body of work entitled Midway. On Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of countless dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the vast polluted Pacific Ocean. His feature length film about this subject will also be shown as part of the public programming for this exhibition. 

This exhibition will also be the public debut of Jordan’s newest photographic series Pacific, in which he uses high-resolution digital photography to convey the vast sublime of the world’s oceans. With these images juxtaposed with his Midway prints, it reinforces the idea that society’s waste problems can affect an ecosystem so far removed from where we live.

Learn more about Chris Jordan: www.chrisjordan.com

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