E-Girl Wisdom: Petra Cortright Has Her Hand On The Pulse
On making the internet work for her, making money, and making what she likes, too.
By Thomas J. Stanton
Photos by Stefan Simchowitz
Published
Artist In Residence is a monthly featured artist. Each month, we profile an artist who creates original artwork for Byline's homepage. Just as we seek to give writers a byline, we seek to give artists space.
There is such a thing as caring and not caring at the same time. Artist Petra Cortright knows that. Cortright makes weirdly beautiful videos and digital paintings without overthinking them, all while keeping a comfortable remove from the art world in which much of her work ends up. “There is the art, the art world, and the art market,” she tells me. “I see these as separate things.”
Cortright is an artist of spontaneous discovery who seems unaffected by self-doubt. She repeatedly messes with age-old institutional depictions like landscapes and portraits in a way that creates depth in a flat medium. Her video manipulations are often crude and glitchy and anything pure also contains an element of lingering chaos. As a matter of mindset, she does not push an agenda with her art nor engage with it in an overly conceptual way. “I don’t think the function of art is to tell people what to think,” she explains. “I think it’s more about asking open-ended questions.”