LOS ANGELES, CA.- Depart Foundation announced today its first solo exhibition of works by Los Angeles based artist Petra Cortright. Curated by Paul Young, NIKI, LUCY, LOLA, VIOLA , on view July 9 – September 12, 2015, will present an immersive viewing experience that features large-scale Flash animations, new video works and animated digital paintings. Cortright’s internet-inspired artworks play with the vernacular of viral internet culture by appropriating some of its most common forms and transforming them into singular, carefully orchestrated, hybrid works that fall somewhere between ironic distantiation and the sincere—its generic forms and content from online.
NIKI, LUCY, LOLA, VIOLA will feature a series of new video works and animations by Cortright, compiled from open-source, screensaver software, and purchased virtual strippers. “Niki,” “Lucy,” “Lola” and “Viola,” are the virtual erotic dancers purchased by Cortright, 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 selfconsciously offer an infinite virtual redundancy in their repetition and absence of real-time.
Alongside these works, Cortright will also be presenting a series of animated digital paintings complied from hundreds of digital layers. These paintings are a combination of abstract gestures, made with customized computer-based paintbrush software, and representational fragments, consisting of sampled clip art and imagery found online. The mesmerizing animation of these dense layers will subtly convey the artist’s meditative process of “painting,” revealing the slow accretion of the work’s ambient surfaces.
Cortright is most well known for her webcam videos; “selfie” inspired digital portraits that are equal parts performance and documentary. No longer than two-minutes each, in keeping with the cultural attention deficit its context suggests, these videos tend to be diaristic in tone, beautifully irreverent and intimately poignant in their intentional fallibility. These, and her current works, embody the peripatetic anxiety of a culture raised with virtual modalities of self-expression, while also humanizing the impoverishment of these digital ruins with intelligence and play. Cortright straddles an ambivalent position as both an avid participant in the banality of this culture, born and raised in the age of technocracy, and as a vehicle for its dismantling and critical fracture.
A catalog entitled CHARLI, DAISY, BLANCA, BIANCA will be released in conjunction with the exhibition, published by NERO. An additional experimental book project, NIKI, LUCY, LOLA, VIOLA , created with designer Mathew Timmons, will also accompany the exhibition.
Petra Cortright has exhibited extensively internationally. Her recent exhibitions include: Petra Cortright, Foxy Production, New York, NY (2015), Petra Cortright, Société, Berlin, Germany (2014), Fútbol: The Beautiful Game, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2014), Petra Cortright, Carl Kostyal, Stockholm, Sweden (2014), ASMR, MAMA, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2014), ✖✗✘ BLank BLANk bLANk , Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA (2013), VICKY DEEP IN SPRING VALLEY, Club Midnight, Berlin, Germany (2012) and SO WET, Preteen Gallery, Mexico City, Mexico (2011). Cortright was featured in the Biennale de Lyon, in 2013, and in the Venice Biennale, in 2009. Notable commissions include, Tags for Likes , Comissioned by MOCAtv, MOCA, Los Angeles, CA (2014), Bridal Shower, Commissioned by Frieze Film 2013 and EMPAC, London, UK (2013). Cortright was an honoree at this year’s Rhizome Future - Proof benefit, and is currently collaborating with British fashion designer Stella McCartney, creating video works for the designer’s eponymous clothing line.
