Petra Cortright
“xxx Blank BLANk bLANk…”
November 9th – December 21st, 2013
Steve Turner, Los Angeles

New media artist Petra Cortright has had an infamous, playful online presence ever since 2007 when she included sexually explicit tags to her innocent enough self portrait style webcam video, “WEBCAM”, on Youtube, which resulted in  Youtube inadvertently mistaking the video for pornography and removing it from their site.  Since then Cortright has continued to produce such webcam portraiture in which she glares into the camera at a supposed, unknown participant, singing and whipping her hair around while colorful animated imagery floats in front of her face and watery, rippling effects alter the frame.  Now after years of cultivating an Internet audience, Cortright has transferred her computer generated work to the three dimensional space of a gallery IRL.

“RGB, D-LAY”, 2011 (video still), Webcam video, 24 seconds. Courtesy of the gallery.

While she has entered the realm of the white cube, she has still not adopted many of its most common commercial tropes, which heightens the conceptual twinge of this, her first solo exhibition at Steve Turner.  For example, as Cortright has been producing webcam videos longer than she has her digital paintings and flash animation, such videos have the most views on her Youtube page, and are priced accordingly.  Comically, next to the titles of her works on the gallery’s checklist, rather than a price in dollars, one will find “Check the Internet for pricing.”

“Enchanted Foreststrippersnopeleeasy2girls[1]”, 2012. Flash animation. Courtesy of the gallery.

Unlike Cortright’s looping webcam “selfies” that focus on the artist in her personal environment, generally giving a causal heir of goofing around with a virtual friend or correspondent, her flash animation videos are made by splicing together tons of visual content from various and often miscellaneous online sources.  When fused together, works such as “coralisland2012_ber_swan_addingirls_HAHACS5[1]”, (2012), incorporate all kinds of fantastical figures and scenes including sexy stock image looking sluts wearing little to nothing, gyrating in glittery, brightly flowered forests or masturbating with watermelons while floating on fluffy white clouds.  These scenes, while on the one hand somewhat childish in nature, also bring viewers directly back to the unusual and spastic world of the Internet with all its colorful, non-sensical and perverted pop-ups and advertisements.

“PokÉmon xxx”, 2013. Digital painting on aluminum. Courtesy of the gallery.

While the webcam and animated videos certainly attract the eye, Cortright’s paintings, (which are in fact prints of digitally rendered paintings), on aluminum, silk and polyester, all of which were made using the default settings on computer programs such as Photoshop, present a far less frantic attitude.  The aluminum works, which appear to be a series, share Cortright’s flare for bright colors and the kind of cyclical motion that is felt in her videos, yet at the same time they exude a placid calm that calls to mind Monet’s water lilies.  Conversely, the paintings on silk are video stills of Cortright’s webcam self portraits, and the polyester has been used to create flags that grace the awning of the gallery and mix together a slew of  typical paint effects such as erasing, mirroring, inverting and blurring.

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“xxx BLank BLANk bLANk…”, installation view, 2013. Courtesy of the gallery.

“xxx Blank BLANk bLANk…” succeeds in being an internet and computer driven body of work in that it remains so even in the flesh.  Unlike other Internet artists,’ whose work often appears in person to be undetectable as such, here Cortright has displaced herself and her work provocatively and indiscreetly.  One immediately gets the sense that these works are not in their natural environment, that they have been removed from the flat space from which they originated.  Nonetheless, these works take up ample physical space and create a coherent tone throughout the gallery, just as any other exhibition of paintings and videos might, yet one cannot deny that it feels as if something is missing – the screen with its menu bars at the top and its scroll bars to the right, the cursor, the little hand, even the dreaded swirly rainbow all feel akin to this work in the best and most awkward way possible.

“xxx Blank BLANk bLANk…” is on view through December 21, 2013.

For more information visit Steve Turner, Los Angeles.

-Contributed by Courtney Malick