When first visiting Petra Cortright’s website, it might be a little unusual as you are scrolled down an arrangement of random emoticons and taken through what-seems-like one endless line of arrows until you are taken to her homepage where there is even more random acts of graphics.  Her style is a non-traditional digital emphasis that reflects her So Cal lifestyle. This L.A. based artist work ranges from digital paintings to performance and though she has such a broad canvas, Cortright was first noticed by her videos in 2007. Her short videos feature her on a webcam experimenting with a virtual identity and self-representation through a digital screen. Along with her videos, she creates digital paintings. She has been featured at the Steve Turner Contemporary and Frieze Art Fair as well as having a popular viewing on YouTube. Her fashionable and experimentation demeanor is a rarity.

For her work to be displayed on the Internet is very important. There are too many resources for her to explore and experiment with that without the Internet, she would have no outlet. Her show “XXX BLank BLANk bLANk • ^• _˚” at Steve Turner Contemporary featured her digital paintings. In an interview for this show, “[Digital Art] is more convenient and less precious than traditional forms like painting…and it doesn’t feel like there’s so much riding on it.” She created said digital paintings by searching the web looking for colors and graphic bits, put them into Photoshop to flatten the hundreds of layers and printed them on aluminum. Her video catalogue needs the Internet to thrive, and without YouTube, well, she would never have been recognized. Her work is also viewed in more traditional spaces for the non e-literate people to view. Not to mention the fact that her videos are so short, it makes perfect sense for them to be online because consumers and viewers on the Internet today don’t exactly have the longest attention span. Each video is just short enough to not make you bored and keep you watching more.

There are many themes floating through her work: experimental, glitch, performance, installation, and certainly playful and spontaneity. In fact, there is “a necessary element of spontaneity,” according to Cortright in an interview for the Frieze Art Fair in London. That ‘s what is so unique about her work is just that. She can’t plan anything while she’s making it, she just does a performance on her webcam and then edits it post-production. Which kind of reminds me of Marisa Olsen when she discussed her process with her Golden Oldies project. She didn’t have an idea in mind, she just made it and went with it. In her videos, she records herself doing, some interesting things. They might seem a bit mundane, or ubiquitous, but how she combines it with EDM (electronic dance music) and remixes the video post-production is unique. Lara Practice, for example is just her dancing to different electronic music while lip singing along, but remixed in a way that is unique. Sure, anyone can dance to a song and record themself, but it’s how she plays with the visual effects that separate her from the amateurs. In the same interview for Frieze Art Fair, she talks about her DIY techniques and using certain tools, “just because I could didn’t mean I should use it. I don’t think that’s a good reason to make work – because you think you should. I try to avoid that in general.” Her most recent video she did for the Frieze Art Fair,Bridal Shower is more of a narrative performance/wondrous/ambiguous fairytale. 

Another thing I find interesting about her work is that the price of her work is based on how many views/hits a particular piece gets. It’s an interesting tactic, while you want people to watch it and for it to get to the public, but would people actually buy it if it ended up getting over 100,000 views? People want to watch it, but I would image you’d be a little more reluctant to view if you wanted to purchase such a piece if it had x amount of views. She leaves the value of her work up to the people. In her interview for Frieze Art Fair, she phrased it as, “Some artists are way more calculated and involved in how they want their work distributed, but I don’t want to play that role. I just want to make pieces. It’s hard enough to do one thing in life.”

Through her experimental videos, Cortright is a net artist who creates and curates her experimental videos in a way that lets the viewers decide. To Cortright, “the web is the ultimate canvas.”

 

http://www.petracortright.com/hello.html

http://www.youtube.com/user/petracortright/videos

http://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/petra-cortright–frieze-art-fair

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/08/on-view-for-petra-cortright-the-web-is-the-ultimate-canvas/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

http://steveturnercontemporary.com/petra-cortright-videos/

 http://dismagazine.com/blog/53092/frieze-london-interview-with-petra-cortright/