His art revolves around a personal mythology drawn from creation myths, particle physics, thermodynamics, and games of chance, among other elements.
Ritchie has established himself in the contemporary fine arts scene since the early 1990s, and had his first group exhibition in 1990 at the Judy Nielsen Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.
This series of paintings, wall drawings, and sculptures introduced Ritchie into the contemporary genre as an artist who "brought together historically and ideologically different belief systems in an attempt to show their common thread.
It's derived from a series of drawings that I scan into the computer and refine through various processes...and send to the sheet-metal shop down the road where it's cut out of metal and assembled into larger structures which are too big for my studio.This method allows Ritchie to reshape his images into sculptures, floor-to-wall installations, interactive web sites, and short stories.
Ritchie draws from numerous meta-narratives that explore religion, philosophy, and science in order to create his complicated, yet freshly simple works.
“Influenced by everything from the mythic escapades of comic-book superheroes and pagan gods to the meta-narratives of philosophy, religion, and science, Ritchie has developed a mythical narrative or cosmology of his own, and his art is communicated via a variety of art spaces and installations, including galleries throughout the world and the World Wide Web.”[3] In an interview with Art:21, Ritchie states that he reads Nature Magazine, which is a weekly journal that publishes technical articles about contemporary scientific findings.
These questions posed by Ritchie rightfully describe his thought process while creating his art, allowing the viewer to better understand his pieces beyond their aesthetic characteristics.
Ritchie, along with six other artists: Erik Adigard, Lynn Hershman, Yael Kanarek, Mark Napier, Thomson & Craighead, and Julia Scher, created stories that could only be told through the computer screen.
The New Place includes mediums outside the web, using sculpture, painting, computer games, and other forms that are not yet defined in this "very large cross-media plan," serving as a trailer of sorts, previewing things to come.
The compositions of Ritchie's works reference the expressionist artists at the start of the 20th century, but differ from his predecessors in their tightness and linearity.
While Ritchie's work depicts contemporary topics and modern-day anxieties, in an interview with the Saint Louis Art Museum, he noted "the idea is to confront and perhaps even transcend the rhetoric of fear that has recently come to dominate all discussions of the future.
Through the writings of individuals such as Lev Manovich, Marshall McLuhan, and Roy Ascott, New Media has been defined, and allotted for artists such as Ritchie to explore and create within the realm of interactive art.
Paul describes this connection here: "databases do lend themselves to a categorization of information and narratives that can then be filtered to create meta-narratives about the construction and cultural specifics of the original material.
"[7] Similar to past new media artists, Ritchie's interactive works originates from his invented meta-narratives, and are then coded into the online database.