Petra Cortright
Petra Cortright is an American artist working in video, painting, and digital media.
Biography
Petra Cortright was born in 1986 in Santa Barbara, California. Cortright is the daughter of two artists; her father who died when she was four, Steven Cortright, was a sculptor/printmaker and art professor at UC Santa Barbara, and her mother is a painter. She studied at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Parsons The New School for Design in New York. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She first came to notice through her self-portrait videos that she uploaded to YouTube.Video works
Cortright is well known for her video works presented on YouTube and in gallery environments. Her videos playfully explore formal properties of video software and the representation of physical bodies in digital spaces.In vvebcam, Cortright filmed herself while playing with the special effects features built into the webcam software used to make the video. On Saturday, December 10, 2011, vvebcam was removed by YouTube because of Cortright's extensive use of "offensive" key words. "Vvebcam is a portrait of the artist as a computer user whose primary mode of existence is recording and being watched".
In 2011 Cortright collaborated with Ilia Ovechkin to create Video Catalog, a work where the monetary value of her videos is determined by an algorithm based on YouTube views.
Vicky Deep in Spring Valley marks the beginning of Cortright's video work with virtual strippers. Cortright lifts the dancing girls from VirtuaGirl, a software that makes chroma keyed footage of "strippers" available for download. These videos are layered against flash images of fantastical digital worlds that are reminiscent of animated desktop wallpaper. A 2015 exhibition at Depart Foundation in Los Angeles titled Niki, Lucy, Lola, Viola included cropped_masked_final, a new video work incorporating characters sourced from VirtuaGirl.
Cortright was selected to participate in the 2013 Frieze Art Fair in London where she produced her self-portrait, Bridal Shower, a film where she experiments with the physical qualities of a production studio. The film was subsequently broadcast on British public television station Channel 4.
In 2014, Cortright began a collaboration with fashion designer Stella McCartney, creating a series of videos where Cortright uses glitches and video manipulation to showcase and contrast patterns on the garments designed by McCartney that she models.
Digital paintings
In 2011 Cortright had her first solo exhibition, So Wet, organized by Gerardo Contreras at Preteen Gallery in Mexico City. Digital images created on the computer were printed on fabric and loosely hung on the walls evocative of the, onshore breeze, warm winters and cool summers of her hometown Santa Barbara. These were unlike previous online works. They were out of context and yet characteristic of a new generation of Post-Internet artists.Cortright continued to assemble collages on the computer, layer on layer, from images found on-line, through raster image manipulations and the addition of painterly digital brushstrokes. The intricate paintings which blend figurative and abstract elements, are printed on a variety of materials—most frequently linen, paper, and aluminum. Each of Cortright's paintings begin with a digital file that the artist refers to as a "mother file," which consists of hundreds of layers that are subsequently printed on a substrate through industrial print processes. Often her works are titled to reflect file names and extensions, as well as search terms used to source found imagery.