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Chris Jordan’s images are horrifying. And that is just fine with the Seattle-based photographic artist behind Running the Numbers, an exhibit running at the Pacific Science Center through Jan. 3.

Jordan uses photography to create fanciful imagery that looks stunning at a distance, but disturbing up close once you realize that the entire picture is made up of our culture’s debris. One picture builds an image of a huge star field using 320,000 light bulbs, the amount “equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage,” according to his Web site, where he has dozens of photos displayed. Others use packing peanuts, oil drums, plastic cups and even toothpicks.

“Exploring around our country’s shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress,” said Chris. “I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity.”

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