Whether writing songs, performing or painting, Emily Ritz works from a place of intuition. Themes of nature, climate crisis grief and sensual self exploration are woven into both practices, creating a clear through line between her sonic and visual worlds. Ritz’s visual work is inspired by textures in nature and spans across paintings, drawings, ceramics, tattoo and embroidery. She incorporates her own figure blending in with the landscape as both an ode and an apology to the Earth. This excavation reveals the hope and beauty that's been buried under fear and doubt. Ritz's work is both personal, and engaged with universally human experiences like sex, death and the overall strangeness of being in a body.
Emily Ritz is a visual artist and musician based in Los Angeles. Her repertoire of work spans twenty years, comprising of several albums and hundreds of works of art, made in interconnected performance and studio practices. Originally from upstate NY, Emily moved to the Bay Area to study media arts at CCA in Oakland. She received a BFA in 2011. Emily’s matrilineage is made up of prolific textile artists; her grandmother Betty LaCasse was world renowned in textile restoration and education. Though she doesn’t repair textiles, Emily does another kind of repair work, focused on the body and spirit. Having suffered from Lyme disease and chronic illness since childhood, using multiple creative practices to transmute pain into beauty has proved medicinal. Emily has worked as a scenic on film sets; a muralist; a ceramicist; and a tattoo artist.