Olive Ritson

Project Statement

Photographs ask a lot of questions. The way these photographs are printed and distributed, spoken about and physically or compositionally changed opens a multitude of possible answers. Using the screen shot function as the camera, I try to capture moments in public domain video clips from pieces of Oregon's past. Growing up in a timber town surrounding a plywood mill surrounded by checkerboard plots of Douglas Fir plantations, I shift and modulate the stills to insist upon questions and answers. Ranging from the spotted owl controversy of the early 1990s to historic footage of early propaganda pushed by the timber industry, I try to reconstruct moments of depersonlization and exploitation into collages of confusion, healing, hope, and grief.

About Olive Ritson

Olive Ritson grew up in a small town within the Umpqua watershed, lived with her family in New Mexico near the Gila River, spent time in Eugene, Oregon to learn history and write a bachelor's thesis on the Willamette River and lives in Portland, Oregon near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. Olive combines research, photography, and digital and analogue media to ask and interpret questions about the way things are and how they're found as they seem to be now in an ongoing and oscilatting process of making sense, the antidote to destructive ignorance. With a slow growing apothecary of medicinal plants and herbs collected from multiple sources, some rich, some dubious, Olive aspires to speak within a plant language that offers hope and resilience.

MFA in Print Media