Los Angeles, CA - The Paul Kopeikin Gallery will present “In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster”, an exhibition by artist Chris Jordan.  The exhibition will open on September 9th and run through October 14th, 2006. This new series, photographed in New Orleans in November and December of 2005, portrays the cost of Hurricane Katrina on a personal scale.  Although the subjects are quite different from those in Chris Jordan’s earlier Intolerable Beauty series, this project is motivated by the same concerns about our runaway consumerism.

There is evidence to suggest that Katrina was not an entirely natural event like an earthquake or tsunami. Never before have the cumulative effects of our consumerism become so powerfully focused into a visible form.  Almost 300,000 Americans lost everything they owned in this disaster. “The question in my mind is whether we are all responsible in some degree.”

The hurricane’s damage has been amplified by other human causes, post hurricane.  Chris Jordan hopes that these images from New Orleans and its surrounding communities might encourage some reflection on the part that we each play, and the loss that we all suffer, when a preventable catastrophe of this magnitude happens to the people of our own country.

Photographs from “In Katrina’s Wake” will also be on display throughout 2006 at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Port Angeles Fine Art Center, PhotoEspaña Festival, ‘Art Not Oil’ traveling exhibition in UK, the Houston Museum of Cultural Arts, and the Houston Center for Photography (information current as of 5.6.2006).

A book of this work titled "In Katrina's Wake" will be released in August, in collaboration with writers Bill McKibben and Susan Zakin. It will feature 50 of Chris' photographs along with essays on the causes and consequences of the Katrina disaster.  The book will be $35.00 on sale through the gallery, all proceeds from this book also will be donated to hurricane relief charities.  All of the artist’s proceeds from 2006 “In Katrina’s Wake” print sales will be donated to Gulf Coast hurricane relief charities, and to non-profit institutions that conduct global-warming research and advocacy.

Visit our website at www.paulkopeikingallery.com and www.chrisjordan.com