Petra Cortright 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. Emphasized by an arsenal of digital brushstrokes, they confound our perception of the digital-analog divide.

Petra Cortright (b. 1986, Santa Barbara) lives and works in Los Angeles. Cortright has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Doota Plaza, Seoul; LIMA, Amsterdam; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh; and Depart Foundation, Los Angeles. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at international venues including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; KM – Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kunsthaus Langenthal, Langenthal; New Museum, New York; 12th Biennale de Lyon, Lyon; and SJ01 Biennial, San Jose.

Reckless Bloom: On Petra Cortright’s Shuddering Landscapes

Kate Brown

It is said that a significant marker of climate apocalypse will be madness pervading the seasons, a kind of riptide devouring natural logic and shifting the lengths of the meteorological calendar. In her new video work, American artist Petra Cortright’s pastiched landscapes defy the assumed order of ecosystems, conveying a low-level anxiety that one might feel when the weather stops making sense. But her crafted scenes also come with a sense of relief. The piece, called

green hill green light esprit de corps, is laced with optimism and freedom.

As is well-evidenced in her ongoing art practice, Cortright is invested in the history of painting. Her scenes recall a continuity of painters throughout history who have tackled nature as subject matter and our own fragility in its grip. To beat back against this notion, painters interpreted the natural with touches of surrealism as Cortright does here. Think of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice from 1823, a work edging on the surreal so much so that it confounded audiences at the time. That kind of Romantic feeling swirls through the artist’s filmed landscape.

This cannot be real, not for a moment. When writing about modernist painting, art critic Clement Greenberg described how the Impressionists left “the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colours used were made of real paint that came from pots and tubes.”* Similarly, Cortright leaves digital details out in the open for us. Low-res grittiness recalls that her pot and tube is a Wacom tablet and downloaded digital brush sets. And that “utter flatness” of modernist traditions that Greenberg croons about is embraced too, via FlowScape and Photoshop. Cortight’s hand is obviously present, meandering, searching, and testing boundaries across bucolic scenery. But is it a creator or a witness? This question haunts the video as we gaze at the blank undersides of daisies catching lens flares.

Disparate foliage is yoked together: we meet a ground of dead leaves but there are no trees from which they fell. The forest floor is like a desktop background, a kind of catchment basin for things nature shrugs off. And it gets wiped out sooner or later, subsumed under the surface and into the bin of earth underneath. The decaying leaves are cut against a bright sky, and they shift under cloud shadows. The limitlessness of the blue is dizzying and this delicate patch of earth teeters between states of birth and nonexistence. Exotic shells bloom in ashy earth. Daisies and cornflowers explode from a rootless, untethered surface.

Cortright’s flowers have a noted stillness even when they pop up from the thin pixel relief. This begs another question: Are we looking at landscape painting or something more akin to still life? I am thinking of what the influential American art historian Norman Bryson noted about Dutch still life painting in particular, a movement that brought together nature from all corners of the world into the space of single paintings. In these works, few connections between the natural objects presented existed. Bryson notes this, adding that “when the framework of space and time is effectively neutralised, there is an elevation of human powers over creatural limitation.” In such paintings, he notes, “lurks a certain Faustian ambition.” * Empty shells from different oceans collapse distance, and flowers from far-off lands result in, as he puts it, the “abolition of place.”

This kind of power taken up by artists was exciting and provocative then as it is now, but we have different tools. Pioneering artists working in the 16th century could not have imagined how flat and stacked the pictorial world would become as it does in Cortrights’s depicted terrain.n

As an artist based in the American West, Cortright has, by osmosis, inherited awareness of distressed ecosystems. The pictorial plane of green hill green light esprit du corps borrows from land-use studies, those diagrams that show controlled flows of water, which map out a controlled forest burn in an attempt to fend off a real one. In such illustrations, multiple scenarios play out at once. And similarly, in Cortright’s 17-minute film, the viewer witnesses a perplexing conundrum of scenarios: cumulus clouds hang above the sun-filled ground and it is also drizzling and it is simultaneously storming. Everything is growing, degrading, and regenerating. A closed loop.

What can we understand from our scientific, artistic, and technological attempts to get to know nature? On some level, pursuits of making sense of things have always been pretty futile. Nothing is inherently important, it’s all about vibe. We have always been at the whim of the world. And so, the artist searches for meaning, or at least beauty, in their work. In Cortright’s case, the hunt is across a delicately rendered map, though it may be better understood as a mind map. The artist searches, maybe, for something like spring. Soon we are panning away from this mirage-like landscape—our anxiety ebbing and flowing as we try to rationalise an irrational place. One may hear the fading echo Rainer Maria Rilke, who captured most perfectly, that seasonal, desperate wonder of the world:

“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colours, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”

*Greenberg, Clement. “Modernist Painting.” (1965). Art in Theory 1990–2000, 2003. Edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood.

*Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, 1990. Reaktion Books.

Petra Cortright makes art in traditional genres, such as landscape and portraiture, using tools, sources, formats, and platforms native to the age of the internet and digital technology.

During the early 2000s, she captured the attention of the art world with a series of self-portrait videos that demonstrated unconventional uses of standard special effects. Petra also makes digital paintings printed on aluminum, linen, and paper. These paintings evoke the work of the Impressionists and other plein air painters, but she sources her imagery online, using the internet as a stand-in for nature.

These works, nonetheless, exert a powerful physical presence. As she puts it, “While the work originates from an endless digital realm, my decision to ‘save as’ finalizes the painting and gives it a unique place in the ‘real world’ forever. I have a deep love of physical things and physical spaces.”

Cortright’s digital paintings combine expansive and seemingly limitless layers of information found while surfing on the internet. She is less concerned with the content of her source material than the colors, surfaces, and textures that she finds there, which she wields as digitally sourced paints using Photoshop to create complex and ebullient compositions comprising up to several hundred layers. The exhibition BALEAF GYS AKADEMIKS maamgic BROKIG presents a series of recent landscape paintings on aluminum, as well as a new video work.

Cortright makes no secret of her affinities with the American west. “Growing up in California,” she says, “I have a West-Coast color palette, and in some paintings, I try to achieve the depth and vastness that is present in the landscapes here. You can see for miles and miles, there are huge mountains and a big ocean, and a lot of different biomes. All of these things seeped into my brain, and it shows up in my aesthetics.” In her newest works, Cortright portrays a series of ruggedly beautiful, invented landscapes that seem to bristle with a sense of foreboding. One painting layers transparent renderings of wintery peaks with bald brown hills that seem to bake in the summer sun. In the foreground vast thickets of agave bloom from negative space, their spiky appendages executed in hot reds and oranges reminiscent of infernal flames. In another work, a turbulent composition of electric-colored mountains and wind-swept trees are practically subsumed by scratches, roiling lines, and splashes of white. Below, entangled configurations of plant life bleed into layers of thorny-shaped cutouts that reveal the substrate of the image. Geographically impossible mashups that collapse space, distance, and weather into one composition, Cortright’s accumulations of pristine snowcapped mountain ranges, rolling hills, and great expanses of agave and whale’s tongue seemed poised on the precipice between heaven and hell, unlocking the dual sense of exaltation and terror inherent in the sublime.

VVEBCAM is a portrait of the artist as a computer user whose primary mode of existence is recording and being watched. Departing from the direct-to-camera address typical of early video art and the ubiquitous selfies of today’s social media, VVEBCAM features Cortright sitting impassively in front of a webcam as she manipulates the clip art moving around her face. The video was made for YouTube, where the artist initially exploited the comments section of the website as much as the video itself, using keywords to attract viewers searching for erotic or offensive content and sabotaging their expectations.

Participation Effect: Petra Cortright’s Webcam Videos, 2007–2017

In February 2007, Cortright uploaded her first webcam video to Youtube. She titled it simply: VVEBCAM. Just under two minutes long, the video shows Cortright disinterestedly scrolling through the catalog of visual effects pre-programmed into her webcam, ranging from dancing pizzas to bolts of lightning. When she hosted the video online, Cortright tagged it with a range of keywords, including names of celebrities, porn search terms, and racial slurs. As a result, VVEBCAM inserted itself into the system of targeted circulation that was coming to define the web 2.0 era.

Between 2007 and 2017, Cortright made fifty webcam videos ranging in length from eighteen seconds to five and a half minutes. In these videos, Cortright explores the vocabulary of pre-fab effects bundled with the webcam and its software, often in tandem with popular music to which the artist sometimes lip-syncs. This was the decade in which the internet ossified as its control came under the hands of a few large corporations like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. In American politics, it is loosely bookended by the social media-lite election of Barack Obama in 2008 and the viral, meme-ified Q-anon fake news of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. It is the decade in which the promise of participation engendered by the internet gave way to disillusionment and control.

Online participation was the structuring principle of Nasty Nets, an online surf club with which Cortright had been involved since shortly after its founding. Nasty Nets was founded in August of 2006, one month before Facebook opened its ability to register to anyone with an email address, instead of only users affiliated with large universities and corporations. It allowed artists to share gifs, jpegs, and videos. Nasty Nets’ surfers—which included artists such as Marisa Olsen, Guthrie Lonergan, and Joel Holmberg, among others—showed a particular fondness for artifacts selected while browsing the internet. As such, Nasty Nets displayed a broad range of online user production, and an appreciation of how daily internet users experimented with the limitations of the internet in order to produce new images. Sometimes, these found things would be modified by Nasty Nets surfers. Frequently, they were displayed alongside original creations.

Giampaolo Bianconi

Petra Cortright used the gallery’s main room to realize an ambitious installation that expands the layers of a digital landscape painting into physical space. The painting’s hundreds of layers, individual and combined, are printed on industrial translucent substrates hung at intervals throughout the space, with pathways through and along the installation that introduce new and ever-expanding opportunities for composition to emerge. Cortright’s brand of landscape is chaotic, beautiful, and volatile, marked by abstraction and populated by jagged .jpg shards and swift blossoms of painterly brushwork; working with a pace and agility the digital methods at her disposal afford, the entanglement of mark-making, color, and texture can assume an almost synesthetic effect.

Cortright operates within the vernacular of landscape painting but outside of its classical means and materials, questioning how the haptic and lyrical might be laced within consumer technology, spam-text poetry, and files chosen not in defense of the poor image but in celebration of it. Her painting software of choice is, of course, Photoshop, and her works mine the expressive and unintended potential of its transformations, effects, and malleability. Evolving from earlier non-figurative works that include flash animation gifs and screensavers, in their insistent lightness and nimble fluency Cortright’s paintings conjure Jim Hodges and Frankenthaler, and convey the quality of ‘breath’ highly regarded in Chinese landscape painting.

In the past decade, as internet culture has steadily progressed towards predictive, targeted consumption, content has become a vehicle for formats and platforms rather than the other way around. By contrast, Cortright’s sensibility extends from the culture of personalization and customization which characterized fledgling internet culture, a DIY-oriented MO of using the most immediate and accessible means to create and share in ways that subvert rather conform to structure and legibility. The very act of making is a through-line that evolves from the artist’s early webcam videos to the most recent paintings that positions the how and why of creative production as a subject in and of itself.

One of the leading post-internet artists, Cortright creates a site-specific installation utilizing Doota’s commercial nature and the surrounding urban landscape. Skinning the shop windows of Doota are her new digital paintings filled with California imagery such as palm trees and succulents in contrast to the hyper-futuristic backdrop of Seoul city center. Her paintings originate as intricate Adobe Photoshop files which consist of layers of digital brush strokes and altered photographs. These files can be transformed indefinitely—layers can be turned on or off, reordered, repositioned, and various effects applied, so at moments which she calls “decisive,” the artist prints, and therefore immobilizes them.

Carefully interspersed throughout the main courtyard are seventeen flags, each standing 4-meters tall and presenting images from three flash animations in her archive, ​Clouds Over the Ocean_upsidedownwithstuckseagull _snowseagulls_looksgood2_NOlineup_withLucyfall_mute_blkbg_wide_60tops.swf, 1@ccess1!2!!3.!ut, ​and schiefler-descramblers_2805.XAP, ​previously exhibited at Depart Foundation in Los Angeles. The flash animations feature strippers that Cortright screen-captured from a PC program called Virtuagirl, in which users can purchase strippers that dance when the computer goes into screensaver mode. Understandably, Cortright’s choice for the content reproduced in forms of flags may ring controversial as public art installation, but the choice is central to her body of work. A large portion of conversations on the Internet questions the place of women within the digital ecosystem, both as consumers and as creators. One particularly volatile area concerns the digital representation of the female body, especially in the context of a male gaze that has historically been more powerful than that of its counterpart.

Cortright’s computer-based practice pioneered a new kind of internet art. The videos in the show will trace the gradual evolution of her online presence, and a practice of perpetual modulation of over ten year of internet ephemera that mines decorative motifs from flowers to the female body. The archival impulse behind her work stresses the visual catchiness and mutability of the digital image, as well as the delicate and self-conscious act of putting oneself “online.” As an artist who “grew up on the internet,” Cortright carefully erects and investigates online trends of personhood as they appear in the culture, from the front-facing camera antics of solipsistic young girls on social media to virtual strippers.

In the back gallery, Cortright’s mind_candy_pfaffs (2015) will loop on a projector. This thornily feminist video depicts cookie-cutter girls from the software VirtuaGirl, “a unique technology of video incrustation that displays videos of sexy girls directly on your taskbar, with no background, just as if they were living inside of your screen.”

The aesthetic of Cortright’s DIY one-woman videos—in which she plays variations of the director, star, and video editor—feels intimately homemade, more akin to a patchwork quilt than an appropriative collage of raw pixels. The work is created using myriad technologies, from open-source screensaver software, green screens, virtual strippers and photoshop, to sublime CGI landscapes. It’s cut down to two-minute experiences, self-referentially ideal for internet consumption by an audience riddled with attention deficit disorders. Her distinctive digital bricolage investigates investigates an ongoing conversation about vanity, personhood, and beauty through the lens of the internet.

die Rose includes two webcam videos, products of Cortright’s ongoing collaboration with fashion designer Stella McCartney. Whereas these two videos are on view for the first time here, McCartney has circulated other videos from the collaboration via social media in addition to showing them in stores around the world. To make the videos, Cortright poses in front of the camera similarly to how she’s been doing for over a decade—now wearing clothes sent to her by McCartney—and then processes the result through different software programs.

For her digital paintings like those found in die Rose, Cortright works for sessions lasting up to 12 hours on Adobe Photoshop. She builds layer upon layer, each time drawing a color, a texture, a shape, etc. from an existing image that she finds surfing Google Images or, more recently, Pinterest. She paints using some brushes that she’s developed herself and others that she’s downloaded. The resulting Photoshop file will contain a couple hundred layers. In order to produce a painting, Cortright will select which layers should be visible, and in which order. Each of the paintings in die Rose derive from the same Photoshop file; however, each represents a different combination of layers and has been printed on a different physical substrate.

Cortright took the same file she used to produce the three digital paintings and then ran the layers through Adobe After Effects—a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing program—to produce the video Block dissassemble

The flags on view have also been printed with variations of the file.

NIKI, LUCY, LOLA, VIOLA featured a series of new video works and animations by Petra Cortright, compiled from open-source, screensaver software, and purchased virtual strippers. “Niki,” “Lucy,” “Lola,” and “Viola” are the virtual erotic dancers Cortright purchased from readily available online software to populate her own synthetic and painterly landscapes and green screen voids. Presented within an immersive installation environment, which will include atmospheric audio components, these works self-consciously offer an infinite virtual redundancy in their repetition and absence of real-time.