Consumption Overload is a photo project which addresses human impact on the environment. Comprising a body of large-scale photomontages, projections and a photographic book, assembled from downloaded photographs from the Internet, it presents a range of problems that we face today including air pollution, climate change, deforestation and nuclear disasters. These multi-layered photomontages explore the altered landscapes and ecosystems that we inhabit and which we have manipulated for our needs.
Our smallest actions not only affect our immediate environment, but also that of people living on the other side of the world. The vastness and interconnectedness of our cycles of resource consumption can be difficult to see and fully comprehend, yet the problems they generate are cumulative and becoming increasingly complex. To consider these multifaceted relationships, Consumption Overload layers together photographs from around the world, obscuring each individual image, to represent the tangled global environment that is the real world we inhabit today.
Michael Kim is a Toronto-based visual artist and commercial photographer. He has been taking photos professionally since 2006, and has collaborated with advertising agencies such as BBDO and Ogilvy, and corporations such as Budweiser, Dove and Mattel. He specializes in still-life photography and digital retouching, but also enjoys landscape photography. His photography has appeared on the cover of Applied Arts Magazine and on billboards, bus shelters and magazines in Canada and the United States. Kim holds a MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University.