Petra Cortright (born 1986) 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 California College of the Arts (CCA) is a private art school in San Francisco, California. It was founded in Berkeley, California in 1907 and moved to a historic estate in Oakland, California in 1922. In 1996 it opened a second campus in Sa ...

in San Francisco (2004) and

Parsons The New School for Design Parsons School of Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is a private art and design college located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Founded in 1896 after a group of progressive artists broke away from established Manhat ...

in New York (2008). 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'' (2007, collection, Museum of Modern Art), 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'' (2007) 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 (2012)'' 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 Frieze Art Fair is an international contemporary art fair in London, New York, and Los Angeles. Frieze London takes place every October in London's Regent's Park. In the US, the fair ran on New York's Randall's Island from 2012–19 and in 2 ...

in London where she produced her self-portrait, ''Bridal Shower'' (2013), 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 Stella Nina McCartney (born 13 September 1971) is an English fashion designer. She is a daughter of British singer-songwriter Paul McCartney and the late American photographer and animals rights activist Linda McCartney. Like her parents, McCa ...

, 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 Post-Internet is a 21st century art movement involving works that are derived from the Internet or its effects on aesthetics, culture and society. Definition Post-Internet is a loosely-defined term that was coined by artist/curator Marisa Olson ...

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.

Feminism in work

According to Petra Cortright, she is a feminist by virtue of being a woman but she prefers to not have her work condensed to that categorization. Nonetheless, Cortright has a wide range of work that involves her playing with female stereotypes using readily available consumer software to produce "selfies". This was before selfies became ubiquitous and made her videos precursors to the smartphone era. Early works such as ''vvebcam'' are infamous for their tags. Using tags such as vagina, boobs, butts, etc . . . Cortright gained an influx of viewers to her work which, in fact, showcased not so flattering angles and mundane situations. The idea of a web camera focusing on a woman doesn’t need to necessarily mean sex and Cortright incorporates this into her art.

Selected exhibitions

Cortright's works have been shown at the

New Museum The New Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker, is a museum in New York City at 235 Bowery, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. History The museum originally opened in a space in the Graduate Center of the then-named New Sch ...

in New York, Rhizome, the

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

, the 2010 01SJ Biennial in San Jose, California, and the 12ième Biennale d'art contemporain de Lyon. Her work is in the permanent collections of the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

(New York), Péréz Museum (Miami), the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 19 ...

, the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the

Moderna Museet Moderna Museet ("the Museum of Modern Art"), Stockholm, Sweden, is a state museum for modern and contemporary art located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, opened in 1958. In 2009, the museum opened a new branch in Malmö i ...

(Stockholm), the MOTI (Breda) in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago is a contemporary art museum near Water Tower Place in downtown Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The museum, which was established in 1967, is one of the world's largest contemporary ...

, the Kadist Foundation (San Francisco), BAMPFA (Berkeley, CA), and the

San Jose Museum of Art The San José Museum of Art (SJMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum in downtown San Jose, California, United States. Founded in 1969, the museum holds a permanent collection with an emphasis on West Coast artists of the 20th and 21st centur ...

, and the

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's ...

. Cortright's work was included in ''Paddles On!'', the first auction dedicated to digital art hosted by a major auction house (

Paddle8 Paddle8 was an online auction house based in New York City selling fine art including Post-War and Contemporary art, prints & multiples, photography, street art and collectibles. Paddle8's sales focus on pieces priced between $1,000 and $100,000, ...

, July 2014).

Awards

In 2015 she was awarded Rhizome's Future-Proof award with Paul Chan & Badlands.

Personal life

Cortright is married to Mark Horowitz. They have one child.

References

External links

Artist's Website

Bibliography

*Bianconi, Giampaolo and Chan, Paul (2021) ''Petra Cortright'' Milan: Skira *Capps, Kriston (January 20, 2009)

''Dallas Morning News''. *Chatel, Marie (November 15, 2018) "In Focus: Petra Cortright" ''Danae'

(retrieved April 10, 2021) *DeNorch, Dan (August 25, 2008)
Young Curators, New Ideas
ARTCAL ''The Zine''. *Johnson, Paddy (March 27, 2007)
Petra Cortright's Webcam Video
''artfagcity'' *Kretowicz, Steph (January 20, 2014) "Our ten favourite digifeminist artists

(retrieved April 10, 2021) *Langmuir, Molly (July 10, 2018) "Why Should A Webcam Plus A Woman Equal Sex? For Petra Cortright, It's Art" ''Elle'

(retrieved April 10, 2021) *Leon de la Barra, Pablo (April 9, 2011) " ''so wet'', petra cortright at Preteen gallery Mexico City" ''Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution''.

(retrieved April 10, 2021) *McKay, Sally (2009) "The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills)" ''art&education papers''

*Sayej, Nadja (February 26, 2018) "petra cortright turns camgirling into feminist art" ''i-D'

(retrieved April 10, 2021) *Sleek team (February 3, 2015) "Petra Cortright on selfies and the feminist question" ''Sleek, Art & Photography'

(retrieved April 10, 2021) *Sterling, Bruce (February 2, 2010)
Petra Cortright is an Internet artist born in 1986 in Santa Barbara, California.
*Beyond the beyond, ''Wired Magazine''. *Troudaire, Gregoire (August 27, 2008)
Petra-sans-effet
''fluctuat.net'' *Williams, Maxwell (November 8, 2013)
For Petra Cortright, the Web Is the Ultimate Canvas." ‘’T Magazine
‘’New York Times. {{DEFAULTSORT:Cortright, Petra Living people 1986 births American digital artists Women digital artists Net.artists 21st-century American women artists People from Santa Barbara, California Artists from Santa Barbara, California