Petra Cortright

1301PE is pleased to announce quicksilver sea bubble dramamine dream, Petra Cortright’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition features a new series of digital paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist. At the core of Cortright’s distinct artistic practice is the creation, manipulation, and distribution of digital files and images. Considered a pioneering figure within the ‘post-Internet art’ movement, Cortright rose to prominence with performative self-portrait YouTube videos such as VVEBCAM (2007). For the last several years, she has expanded her digitally based practice to include paintings and sculpture.

“What do you lose, what can you always have.”
– Petra Cortright

quicksilver sea bubble dramamine dream grapples with grief, loss, change, comfort, health, childhood, poison, toxins, nostalgia… anxiety. These deeply personal paintings continue a shift in Cortright’s practice where she is actively photographing subject matter around where she is living, as opposed to her earlier process of mining the internet for images. The distance from the natural world in Cortright’s recent body of work is magnified by the fact that the flora, fauna, and landscapes captured in her disjunctured paintings are sourced from photographs she has taken of the dioramas and exhibits of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. In these paintings, Cortright transports and amalgamates the early 20th century traditions of plein-air painting and Californian Impressionism to the post-digital age while engaging with her own relationship to Santa Barbara’s locale.