Petra Cortright (American, b. 1986) is a Los Angeles-area artist who moves between webcam-based video, GIF animation, and paintings composed from hundreds of layered Photoshop brushstrokes.,As a student, she attracted attention from media outlets, art critics and journalists for vvebcam (2007), a self-portrait video posted to YouTube.,That early series of webcam videos is credited with establishing her as a figure in the post-internet art movement.
While a student at Parsons School of Design in New York in 2007, she made vvebcam using a webcam bought for $19.95 rather than checking out video equipment for a class assignment, filming herself testing the camera's built-in effects.The video's added keywords, some offensive, drew heated comments and led YouTube to remove it in 2010. It was later reconstructed and preserved in Rhizome's Net Art Anthology. In 2012 Artforum featured her work in an article by Bruce Sterling, and the next year her video RGB, D-LAY (2011) was offered at the Paddles ON! auction.
Since the early 2010s Cortright has increasingly composed her digital paintings by layering images and brushstrokes in Photoshop, printing them on aluminum, linen or paper.,,That movement between digital and physical work has been cited, alongside Cory Arcangel and Rafaël Rozendaal, as exemplary of post-internet art.By the mid-2010s her paintings were being sold at auction amid a market wave critics called Zombie Formalism.From 2011 she worked with virtual figures she calls “the girls”, culminating in the 2015 body of work Niki, Lucy, Lola, Viola at Depart Art Foundation, projected onto a screen more than 21 feet long. She said she wanted the installation to “raise questions about the way we view women in a digital landscape”, without necessarily answering them.Her work entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Hammer Museum and Moderna Museet, and in 2016 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art acquired two of her video works.,
Her GIF series System Landscapes, centered on the discontinued Adobe ImageReady tool, was paired with the work of the artist John Karel in the Museum of the Moving Image installation “Refreshing the Loop”.In 2023 she released New Landscapes 2023, thirty-three pieces on Feral File exploring a simulated desert environment, for FEMMEBIT's exhibition “In Medias Res”. She has said she lives on the edge of Los Angeles, at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains.A related piece, New Landscapes 2023 (Heaven), an AI-altered underwater environment, was shown in “E-motions”, a 2023 Unit London exhibition curated by Claire Silver.
