Petra Cortright

Petra Cortright (b. 1986, Santa Barbara) lives and works in Los Angeles. She first gained attention for webcam self-portrait videos altered by animated gifs that she would post to her YouTube account and caption with spam text. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include works in painting, sculpture, film, and video. In Cortright’s hands, painting opens up expansive and seemingly limitless layers of information found while surfing on the internet. She has referred to her painting process as “breaking down photography,” often creating up to hundreds of layers before printing the result to canvas or high gloss paper. Google Images, Bing, and Pinterest, with its array of dream interiors, have proven to be rich repositories of material for the artist. She is less concerned with the content of the images than the colors, surfaces, and textures that she finds there, which she wields as digitally sourced “paints” to create her complex and ebullient compositions. Cortright’s luminous renderings recall the celestial hues of classical impressionist painting as much as the ambient glow of the computer screen. Emphasised by an arsenal of digital brushstrokes, they confound our perception of the digital-analog divide.