Fotobokfestival Oslo
Fotobokfestival Oslo

KARI ØRVIK - RESTING PLACE

Resting Place is a meditation on grief, loss, and accumulation that explores our material legacies and the precariousness of their place in our environments. Ørvik’s imagery weaves together the personal and universal, between the tainted waters of mines in Alaska and Montana, a mattress disposal facility in California, and items left from her deceased parents in Norway and the US.

In Resting Place, memory is not a choice. The images on translucent paper sometimes double and stack on top of one another, and other times degrade, using the same polyester paper as a lithographic plate to make ghosted prints of the images. Their imprint, however, never completely disappears. Where an image of a mattress can metaphorically represent both a life and a death, as in the case of the final image of Ørvik’s mother’s bed — used for the ad placed to have it taken away after she passed — the book also explores its physical legacy, and how many lifetimes will be outlived by the environmental imprint of its industrial materials.

BIO

Kari Ørvik is a San Francisco based photographer born in Canada, who uses film and historic photographic processes to engage possibilities of place, material and memory. A graduate of Stanford University, her work has been exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California, the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles, and is in the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum. She was a graduate fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and an artist-in-residence at Recology SF (the dump). She teaches photography and operates a tintype portrait studio in San Francisco.

KARI ØRVIK - RESTING PLACE

Resting Place is a meditation on grief, loss, and accumulation that explores our material legacies and the precariousness of their place in our environments. Ørvik’s imagery weaves together the personal and universal, between the tainted waters of mines in Alaska and Montana, a mattress disposal facility in California, and items left from her deceased parents in Norway and the US.

In Resting Place, memory is not a choice. The images on translucent paper sometimes double and stack on top of one another, and other times degrade, using the same polyester paper as a lithographic plate to make ghosted prints of the images. Their imprint, however, never completely disappears. Where an image of a mattress can metaphorically represent both a life and a death, as in the case of the final image of Ørvik’s mother’s bed — used for the ad placed to have it taken away after she passed — the book also explores its physical legacy, and how many lifetimes will be outlived by the environmental imprint of its industrial materials.

BIO

Kari Ørvik is a San Francisco based photographer born in Canada, who uses film and historic photographic processes to engage possibilities of place, material and memory. A graduate of Stanford University, her work has been exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California, the Petersen Museum in Los Angeles, and is in the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum. She was a graduate fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and an artist-in-residence at Recology SF (the dump). She teaches photography and operates a tintype portrait studio in San Francisco.