Kari Orvik

Photographer and Educator

Resting Place

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Biography: Kari Orvik is a San Francisco-based photographer and educator. Using film, the wet plate collodion process, and found materials, her work looks at the resilience and fragility of our changing urban and natural environments, exploring what we hold... MORE

Resting Place

by Kari Ørvik
San Francisco, CA
2020
60 pages, 10” x 7.5”
Acrylic cover
Sewn coptic binding
Process: Offset printing, lithographs
Edition size: 30 + 10 limited edition set w/ signed gelatin silver prints

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 a mattress represents multiple possibilities: a literal human life or death, or a metaphysical death where it is uncertain how many lifetimes will outlive the lingering physical legacy and environmental imprint of these industrial materials. Printed on translucent pages, the images sometimes double and stack on top of one another, and other times degrade by using this same polyester paper as a lithographic plate to make ghosted prints of the images.

Kari Ørvik is a San Francisco based photographer 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.

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Resting Place

Updated Jun 2020

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Topics Black and White, Conceptual, Photography