In their recent exhibition, titled “Rare Earth,” Briar Marsh Pine, who is a visiting faculty member in the UO photography department, examines the complex relationship between humanity and rare earth metals.

The exhibition is a continuation of Pine’s textile and photographic exploration of the waste caused by steel mining in their home state of Minnesota.

“I knew I wanted to expand on the things I learned from that project, so I had an outline where I wanted to make this textile piece; and I wanted to make a bunch of images and gather all these materials, and from there this body of work really grew,” Pine said.

While the technologies which utilize rare earth metals have only been popularized in the last three decades, the mining of such metals began in 1788 with the discovery of yttrium in Sweden. The metals, which consist of the lanthanides (La to Lu), scandium (Sc) and yttrium (Y), were coined “rare earth” because they were both novel and could be dissolved with acid.

The metals themselves aren’t exceptionally rare. However, they exist in small quantities throughout Earth’s crust, rather than large deposits. The diffused nature of the metals exacts a complicated extraction process which creates a high volume of waste, contaminating the environment around the mine.

While China has been the primary source of rare earth extraction with notoriously lax waste policies in the early 1950s, the U.S. tried their hand at the practice, opening Mountain Pass Mine in San Bernardino, CA.

The mine has a storied history, involving many owners, a bankruptcy in 2015 and a $35 million dollar contract with the Department of Defense in 2022. With tariffs limiting international trade of technologies which necessitate rare earth, the relevance of Mountain Pass Mine — the only U.S.-based rare earth mine — and the environmental concerns which accompany increased extraction are rising.

Pine’s “Rare Earth” offers a novel look into the complex reality of rare earth consumption. “My goal is to provide a different point of entry to think about something differently, something you’re probably already engaging with whether you know it or not,” Pine said.

While Pine spent over a year researching the mine before accepting a visiting faculty position in the photography department, it was their newfound proximity to the mine and an invitation from Mike Bray — a founder of Ditch Projects — that pushed them to complete the exhibition.

“A lot of my practice was centered around the history of U.S. geological surveys and landscape photography, so this was really a natural progression for me,” Pine said.

While Pine was pressed for time, they found the constraints were just what they needed. “I had less than four months to make the images before printing and framing, so there wasn’t a lot of room for questioning myself,” Pine said. “I really had to work and trust my intuition, so that was really rewarding.”

The work is multimedia in nature, using everything from digital collages to still life, so their research reflected that. “There were a lot of press releases and government websites where they wrote about the different funding sources for mountain pass, but a lot of the websites are different convoluted internet archives,” Pine said. “I was looking at images and a lot of what I do is working with existing images.”

By literally extracting pieces of image from various sources, Pine used their newfound studio space at University of Oregon to create relationships between their mediums.

“Prior to my work here, I was more of an on-location photographer, but recently the process has been in the studio,” Pine said. “It’s been really rewarding to have complete control over what materials are speaking together.”

The complex arrangement of materials parallels the fundamental problem with rare earth that Pine seeks to highlight. With approximately 92% of Americans owning smartphones, we are all involved. Pine recognizes that nobody’s hands are clean. “In one of the photographs, I include my cell phone and my camera because I am within the system,” Pine said.

While such an acknowledgement may drive a cynic to despair, Pine is hopeful that their work will provide the stimulus to continue pursuing a solution. “I don’t want to give answers necessarily because I don’t think that’s the most interesting thing to think about,” Pine said. “I’d rather turn the situation over in your head; this is something that is occurring in the world that we are all implicated in.”

While many artistic endeavors attempt to convey value with heady and heavily contextual subject matter, Pine’s work concretely engages with audiences, providing a medium for conversation about a lesser-known topic.

“Here is something that is happening in the world but you’re not reading about it, which is a great way to learn things, but it can be hard to empathize and engage with it on a human level,” Pine said.

With a new lithium mine in the works on the Oregon-Nevada border, Pine is already looking into their next project. “I think I’m going to bridge the two, because they are so intertwined; and I also have my past work in steel, so I’m thinking about tying all three together and looking at this industry from a material point of view,” Pine said.

“Rare Earth” is on display at Ditch Projects in Springfield until May 4, so take the 15-minute bus from campus and check it out. “I hope that you have questions after this, and that you’re turning them over; if you’re asking questions, that’s exciting to me,” Pine said.