Bryce Ritchie
Past Artist In Residence
1998

The Australian painter and installation artist, Bryce Ritchie, joined 18th Street for four months in 1998 as the artist-in-residence. Sponsored by the Australia Council for the Arts, Ritchie produced a body of work that related to the way of life and crime within Los Angeles. He fabricated paintings and an installation that dealt with the American urban environment, relationships between American contemporary history and Australia, the American artists’ allegiance to America, and American attitudes to art produced in countries outside the U.S.; and finally links between advertising, crime and creativity, and the prison system.  In particular, he was able to comment on how American advertising dictates the culture of desire to a global youth, giving a sense of heroic affiliation through the mass media as a fashionable gesture. The work that Ritchie produces is always in dialogue with the viewer as it often shifts between painting and installation. The work he produces is a process, which embodies participation, with the agenda being his theoretical concern that he keeps obscured with a superficial simplicity, humor and a graphic approach. He has a great affinity with commercial advertising and its psychological impact on the human psyche.