Straddling a fine line somewhere between sincere participation and ironic appropriation, Petra Cortright’s multimedia cyberspace art endlessly reflects and redoubles the medium from which it borrows. The Internet is Cortright’s vehicle and content, framed by alternating degrees of equivocation and self-assertion. Self-described as a “visual hoarder,” Cortright collects found imagery, animations, textures and effects online, scouring the Internet for things of visual interest to incorporate into her works. The digital world she references is simultaneously empty of substantive reality, being that it is inherently immaterial, yet erupts with infinite virtual content. This feeling of saturated emptiness is something that Cortright channels expertly in her works.

Originally from Santa Barbara and now based in LA, Cortright creates digital paintings, animations and webcam pieces that vary in tone, ranging from the playful, serious, disaffected and sincere, to the absurd and satirical. She welcomes the errant and glitchy dysfunction of an imperfect digital world, emphasizing and emulating the tropes and trappings of its visuals and culture. She is both a performer and a candid bystander, a critical voice and a blithe participant, and it is this unfixed position vis-à-vis her medium that makes her work so magnetic and compelling; it’s an apt ambivalence, one that mirrors the promiscuous consumption, relativism, and un-attachment the Internet demands.

Petra Cortright, still from “BRIDAL SHOWER”

 Now 28 years old, Cortright is best known for her candid webcam works; short diaristic video pieces that she began making in the early 2000s and posted freely to YouTube. In these 2-minute shorts, she acts as performer and documentarist, unselfconsciously creating movements, gestures and reactions, often to techno and synth music, all captured in a single shot. She uses found animations, GIFS, filters and live-effects webcam software to embellish and activate these “selfie” inspired images, generally using the most basic defaults available. This decidedly millennial, virtual mode of self-expression—available to any adolescent with basic computer access—when used by Cortright, feels as fluid and free-flowing as the best intuitive mark-making. Therein lies the strange paradox. Using the most rudimentary digital means, she creates works that disavow and reinforce the banality of her medium, all the while remaining inexplicably beautiful and undeniably timely.

In her most recent solo exhibition, Niki, Lucy, Lola, Viola, curated by Paul Young and on view at the DEPART foundation from July 9th until September 19th, Cortright presents a series of new works based on virtual action stripper girl software, or “VirtuaGirls.” These downloaded animations of women—ultimately collectible virtual strippers for use on a desktop—were developed as screensaver software, readily available for purchase online. As the title of the exhibition suggests, each individual stripper is acquired and collected by name. Cortright purchases them for use in these works, setting them against a stark fluorescent green screen background and looping the projection so that they dance in a seemingly infinite digital striptease. Minimally interactive, the software allows you to pick them up and drop them, from top of screen to bottom, a feature that Cortight uses extensively in the works. They are larger than life projections, and startlingly impressive when viewed in the complete darkness of the gallery. They are also uncannily devoid of any reference to actual space or time, and remain suspended in this strangely disembodied space.

Petra Cortright, still from “Niki, Lucy, Lola, Viola”

Petra Cortright, still from “Niki, Lucy, Lola, Viola”

When encountering these “girls” as large-format projections, they feel both powerful and vulnerable, generic and yet special. Cortright has done very little to transform them, allowing them rather to exist unmodified as “found” digital elements in abstract green space. They are plucked from the web and dropped into the gallery in the most literal way, and the transplant feels simultaneously objectifying and humanizing. Cortright maintains that they are not intended as ironic or condescending appropriations, but rather offered with sincerity. Visually mesmerizing, the works are strangely beautiful, and attest to Cortright’s gift for extracting beauty and aesthetic nuance from the most generic online sources.

Petra Cortright: Nicki, Lucy, Lola, Viola
DEPART Foundation
9105 W. Sunset Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90069
July 9–Sept 12, 2015
Opening Hours: Wed-Sat 12PM/5PM