Petra Cortright in Conversation with Brian Butler (Free Entry)

Los Angeles artist Petra Cortright is visiting Australia for her solo show at 1301SW, Gadigal/Sydney. And she’s giving a talk at the IMA. In conversation with 1301SW Director Brian Butler, she will discuss her latest body of work.

Cortright is a leading figure in net and post-internet art. She rose to prominence in the 2000s with her low-fi self-portrait videos. Using a domestic webcam, she recorded herself acting playfully or stoically, adding effects, animations, and GIFs. She captioned her videos with spam text, curses, and search-engine-optimisation keywords and uploaded them. Removed by YouTube in 2010 for its provocative spam tags, her landmark 2007 video VVEBCAM is now in the Museum of Modern Art collection.

Cortright subsequently moved into ‘painting’. In Photoshop, she compiled images harvested from Google, Pinterest, and Bing with digital brushstrokes. She was less concerned with the content of her source images than their colours and textures. She built mother files with hundreds of layers, which she excavated, then printed the results. Conflating an impressionist look with the computer screen’s glow—and confounding the digital-analog divide—Cortright has been dubbed the ‘Monet of the twenty-first century’.