Artist Profile

Petra Cortright is a digital artist with an extremely diverse portfolio. She works in many different mediums, including video, paintings, and gifs. Cortright’s work is very abstract, with all of her pieces being manipulated using video or editing software in some form. Cortright regularly deals with feminism in her work.

Cortright has struggled with censorship throughout her career. One of her most notable works,vvebcam (2007) was removed from YouTube due to ‘offensive language’. Cortright placed many tags on the video, from “ESPN” to “Paris Hilton” to increase viewership, a strategy that many social media platforms today use. Facebook, for example, is able to use a user’s likes to “build a highly accurate profile of the subject, including their ‘sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender’” (Zeynep 3). Cortright was essentially using this strategy before it was widely implemented. She also tagged the video as being ‘sexually explicit’, which resulted in its removal from the platform, despite the video not containing any sexual content or words whatsoever. Despite her struggles with censorship, Cortright continues to make videos and digital art and upload them to various different platforms.

The first work of Cortright’s I would like to examine is pCPOWer. This is a mixed media digital painting.

This image made me think of a city on fire when I first saw it, with the orange sticks reminding me of flames, and the gray and black splatters being smoke. However, when I started to look at it more closely, my perception completely changed. I feel like those objects look like lipsticks to me, which would make sense with Cortright’s continued themes of feminism. I also noticed some flower painted around which I didn’t notice before. This piece can be interpreted as using glitch as described by Legacy Russell. If glitch is “an error, a mistake, a failure to function”, then Cortright is using glitch to disrupt the impact of the beauty industry (Russell 15). Russell’s thought of “we feel no guilt or shame about turning our backs on a market that wants to eat us alive” is a sentiment that is strongly echoed in this piece (Russell 105).

I believe the content is the destruction that the beauty industry can cause. Cortright is expressing her disgust with the beauty industry. The lipsticks are marred and smudged, almost completely scratched out, as though Cortright is rejecting the beauty standards placed on women, and advocating for their eradication. The form is a blue background with orange lipsticks painted on. The lipsticks are covered in in black strokes and shapes of various weights and styles. There are certain repeating symbols, such as the white flowers, as well as some organic shapes that are reminiscent of butterflies. The stance is emotive communicative function, as Cortright is clearly expressing her emotion of disgust towards the beauty industry. The work also has a poetic communicative function since it is first and foremost a work of art.

The second work is titled hands1 (2008). This is a gif.

This piece is completely different from the first one. The gif is mostly in grayscale, with only small accents of color. It is also much more chaotic- the gif flashes through the different stages of the hand very quickly, and there is constantly motion going on in each frame.

I think the content of this piece is getting pulled in different directions. The outstretched hand represents offering yourself to people. Yet the constant changing of the pieces in the hand represent how you have to change yourself in order to fit people’s expectations. The most glitched part of the hand literally being pulled apart signifies how you can stretch yourself too thin, and how difficult it is when everyone wants something from you. The form is a black and white hand filled with different designs in a grid. The hand glitches out during the first portion of the gif and the patterns change within the hand during the other portions, along with the colors. The hand is situated in an empty space. The toolbar can be seen in several of the portions, particularly during the glitch portion. The stance is emotive communicative function, with the emotion as I interpret it being stress. There is also poetic communicative function from an artistic perspective.

I chose to relate Cortright’s pieces to the work of Carla Gannis. Carla Gannis is a New York based artist who has been prominent in the digital art scene since the 1990s. Gannis has a very unique and diverse style, producing artworks using many different types of media, including video exhibits, augmented reality, and painting, much like Cortright. However, she is most well-known for combining digital imaging with classical paintings. Most of her work is based around the digital era and uses some form of technology as a focal part of the artwork. She has made complex portraits totally out of emojis. Gannis has published a book of her emoji-based art titled The Selfie Drawings, of which only 100 were printed. All have been sold. Her work has been showcased at several exhibits including "Harvestworks". She also hosts a temporary online art exhibit that you can virtually walk through, and view the work of many artists as well as her own.

Specifically, Gannis’ piece The Garden of Emoji Delights reminds me of pCPOWer. The color composition is similar, with blues and oranges featuring heavily in both works. Although they are totally different mediums, to me the effect is completely similar. The Garden of Emoji Delights is a triptych and its comparable to that first piece because there are also three points of interest surrounded by intricate details.